EVELYN’S BIOGRAPHERS have tended, understandably, to emphasize the first two-thirds of his life more than the last; the three decades at the end of the seventeenth century seem patchy, less able both for Evelyn himself and for his biographers to discern much structure, private vitality or new excitement, even though more information is now available. Thus ‘life went on’, wrote John Bowle in 1981, ‘the life of official London carried on’, yet Evelyn was ‘ubiquitous’ (John Evelyn and His World, pp. 185, 89, 204), and Gillian Darley in 2006 entitled one of her last chapters in John Evelyn: Living for Ingenuity ‘Perpetual Motion’. It is true that this ‘chameleon’, as he has been called, seemed less able to find a centre for his turning world. During the last decades there were often tense and dispiriting interconnections between his personal, domestic life and public affairs, though not entirely of his own choosing.
His faith and family had always been important. The first became something of an obsession in the last decades of the century, first as he involved himself during most of the 1670s with an extremely pious young maid of honour at court, Margaret Blagge, which somewhat discomforted Mary, and then with his larger unhappiness at the rise of Roman Catholicism, as he watched the forced departure of James II and the arrival of William and Mary to the throne.
The growing family was also shadowed by illness, and the deaths of his father-in-law and two daughters; Sir Richard Browne, grumpy, ill, living now at Sayes Court and frustrated with his failure to obtain the monies that were owed him and thinking, along with his daughter, that Evelyn ought to have done more to pressure the government to reimburse them. By accident, that involved Evelyn battling with a powerful official, Sidney Godolphin, his friend and the widower of Margaret Blagge, whose life Evelyn was writing after her untimely death in childbirth.
Thus faith, family and government interacted, and not without unhappiness and frustration on all sides. The base of family life, Sayes Court, was devastated in the winter of 1685–6, and he set himself to refashion it. But a combination of having to rethink the garden, his old age, other disappointments with life in Deptford and – another accident – the reversion to him of Wotton after his brother’s death without male offspring, all ensured the family’s removal in the mid-1690s from Sayes Court to residence at Wotton. Yet even that happy and unexpected outcome was dogged with legal and financial troubles.
By the end of the century he did publish again – the modest verses of Mundus Muliebris by his daughter Mary, who had died of smallpox in 1685, preceded by his own preface and a burlesque ‘Fop-dictionary’. Others were more substantial, like his Numismata (1697) and Acetaria (1699), and his last, important translation, of La Quintinie’s The Compleat Gard’ner (1693). This turned out to be his final venture into garden matters, for ‘Elysium Britannicum’ continued to languish, with only Acetaria rescued for publication from its accumulating pile of manuscript drafts; as an addendum to that work he had added his 1699 outline of the ‘Elysium’. That failure was due undoubtedly to both a public and a personal debacle.
He still relished the advice he could give on others’ gardens and continued his visits and comments on what he observed there, at least in his Diary. At Cliveden, the ‘stupendous natural rock, wood & prospect’ of the Earl of Rochester, he was reminded of the Villa Aldobrandini at Frascati, a romantic place that solicited ekphrastic poetry: Cliveden had been created at ‘extraordinary expense’, with grottoes in the chalk hillsides, ‘cloisters, descents, gardens, and avenues through the wood august & stately’. In contrast, and on the same excursion, he found and much preferred both the painter Antonio Verrio’s ‘pretty garden, with its careful choice of flowers and curiosities’ near Windsor, and his cousin George Evelyn’s flat site of Huntercombe Manor – ‘with sweet gardens, and exquisitely kept, though large’. He visited Cassiobury Park in Hertfordshire at the invitation of the Earl of Essex, and admired the house, especially the carving of Grinling Gibbons, whom he had discovered earlier; its landscape setting was immense, cut through with avenues and elaborate tree planting, especially firs, under the care of Moses Cook. On another occasion, the wealthy merchant Sir Josiah Child, who had established his estate from scratch on a barren site in Epping Forest, Evelyn saw as typical of ‘those over grown and suddenly monied men’. To Althorp, he was invited by the Countess of Sunderland, one of the intellectual women he always admired, and while reserved about her husband’s Catholicism, he applauded the avenues, canals, fishponds and game preserves that were ‘all managed without any show of solicitude’. By 1700 Pepys had moved to Clapham, where Evelyn’s visit found him happy and the house furnished with Indian and Chinese curiosities, with gardens and buildings admirably suited for pleasurable retirement, which by then Evelyn was himself trying to enjoy at Wotton.
He was also, during these years, still active on projects that grew out of his European experiences and enthusiasms, working for the Council for Foreign Plantations, lately Council of Trade and Plantations, where John Locke was now secretary.1 He was grateful and curious to learn about the immense vegetation that was reported in Virginia, and shared a correspondent’s worry that scientific pursuits there were being submerged in the zeal for making money. At the Royal Society, he continued to attend meetings, present papers and chair committees, but the institution was in need both of more useful members and more funds, and Evelyn was distressed at the king’s failure to support it; he also engaged himself to find it a permanent home. He took on the secretaryship there for a while, but refused its presidency when he was nominated in 1690 and again in 1693, wishing to ‘avoid it in this ill conjuncture of public affairs’, all the while hearing sermons on ‘the different ends of the upright and wicked’, or ‘the falsehood & vanity of evil courses’, while noting ‘exceeding great storms & yet warm season’ in November 1690. He enjoyed the sight of a young rhinoceros (‘or unicorn’ – ‘more resembled a huge enormous swine’), the first to be seen in England, which he described in great and careful detail; also a ‘living crocodile’ from the West Indies (Diary, IV.390–91). And notwithstanding his aversion to military service, he was delighted by the re-enactment at Windsor Castle of the battle of Maastricht (‘artificially designed’). It was more serious than the modest effort by Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim, described later by Sterne in Tristram Shandy, to represent the siege of Namur, and it was an uncanny precursor of modern re-enactments. The Windsor event still delighted this member of the Royal Society for what he took to be accurate manoeuvres and displays of military engineering – a ‘formal siege, against a Work with Bastions, Bullwarks, Ramparts, Palizads . . . hornworks, Counterscarps &c’. He was happy to note that, with guns fired on both sides, the grenades, exploding mines, parties advancing, prisoners taken, ‘what is most strange, [it was] all without disorder, or ill accident’.
On a more practical bent, he found opportunity to advise (negatively) the Lord Treasurer on the purchase of books from the library of the deceased Earl of Bristol, but was far more concerned to see that a public library be established. He was always eager to promote libraries (and the index of his published Diary has two columns of references about them), but he was particularly eager to see books in the hands of those not able to afford and maintain one. He worked with Thomas Tenison and Wren to erect a library ‘for public use’ in the parish of St Martin-in-the-Fields, and in planning a hospital for disabled soldiers at Chelsea, designed by Wren, he recommended a library and even suggested books that the inhabitants might find suitable even if they were not ‘studious’. Wren’s handsome design for the Royal Hospital, the foundations of which were laid in 1692, had gardens and canals towards the Thames, reminiscent of Maisons, one of Evelyn’s favourite French landscaped sites. Evelyn had hoped that he could become its governor, but eventually accepted the offer by Godolphin to be its treasurer.
His meagre salary as treasurer did not arrive, and lack of sufficient funds provided a leitmotif in many letters dispatched especially to Godolphin in pursuit of either monies to reimburse his father-in-law or to obtain salaried positions for him and his family. His sense that Godolphin was ‘My dearest friend’, as he frequently addressed the man who had married the sainted Margaret Blagge, encouraged him to deluge him with lengthy, carefully argued requests that Godolphin, now more and more an established figure in government, must have found both embarrassing and impossible personally for him to respond to without consultation. Evelyn even lamented in 1679 the fact that Godolphin’s dedication of ‘yourself so profitably to the benefits of the public’ in ‘all your moments’ (LB, II.634) had lost him ‘the most sensible effects of that endeared friendship I once enjoyed, without envying the felicity of one that is now in Heaven [that is, Margaret]’, and then proceeded to seek help for his brother-in-law, William Glanville!
Even now well advancing in years, Evelyn was still ambitious for some more settled and congenial government work, though as early as On Liberty and Servitude (1649; MW, pp. 27–37) he had resisted enslavement of a courtier’s mind and body by political business; now his needs were as much for funds as for obtaining a post. Nonetheless, he accepted the invitation to join James II’s Privy Council, hoping for some useful role in government, both for himself and for obtaining a post for his son. Yet, as noticed in the previous chapter, Lord Berkeley worried that his appointment to the Privy Council would obstruct completion of the work on ‘Elysium’, and Evelyn himself found that it involved uncomfortable decisions. While he apparently did not dislike James personally, he found his Roman Catholicism abhorrent in a public figure. As the unease and discomfort grew in the nation, and finally into its rejection of a Catholic monarch, Evelyn was also wavering about the country’s future. However, keeping in touch with government circles perhaps offered him also a chance to finally resolve the issues of both Sayes Court, still leased, and the payments owed to Sir Richard by his father-in-law’s former trustee William Prettyman, as well as the funds that Sir Richard thought were owed to him from his post in France; both were eventually settled, but only after protracted and expensive court proceedings.
In 1695 Evelyn, again through the offices of Godolphin, was appointed Treasurer to the Royal Naval Hospital at Greenwich, which was being projected with Wren as architect. It replaced an abandoned palace and it would, thought Evelyn, be the British equivalent to the Invalides in Paris. His salary was small (£300 per annum), though, more crucially, funding for this project was forever difficult and never appeared when it was needed. A subscription list was formed to raise money, but many who pledged did not contribute; yet the foundation stone was laid on 30 June 1696. In April 1700 William III was presented by Wren and Evelyn with a model and engraved plans of the Hospital, and three years later Evelyn, now 83, resigned the treasurership to his son-in-law, William Draper. (An engraving of this handsome complex was published in 1725 in Colen Campbell’s Vitruvius Britannicus, a vision that would have delighted Evelyn for its classical proportions, its quads reminiscent of Oxford and Cambridge, its truly British splendour and its dedication of the nation’s naval traditions, as well as its landscape situation; he would also have applauded Campbell’s title.)
If his research, scholarship and hopes for employment lacked clarity and direction, so at times did his private life. The family took care and attention – and he was nothing if not stern and advisory when it came to dealing with his surviving son, who did not match the vision he had once envisaged for the five-year-old Richard before his early death in 1678; the same stricture that his father-in-law had expressed then – that Evelyn was ‘over charging’ the young boy, whose ‘tabula rasa [was] easily confounded’ – could be applied now to John, who seemed unable to match his father’s hopes for success in the world.
Two daughters also died. Mary, the eldest and dearest, born in 1665, died from smallpox, aged nineteen. Her father’s Diary is remarkably eloquent on her accomplishments,
curious of knowing everything to some excess, had I not sometimes repressed it [sic!] . . . She had read an abundance of history, and all the best poets . . . all the best romances and modern poems; she could compose happily, and put in pretty symbols, as in the Mundus muliebris, wherein is an examination of the immense variety of her modes and ornaments belonging to the sex; but all of these are vain trifles to the interior virtues which adorned her soul (IV.420–22).
Five years after her death he published her poem on the world of women as the Mundus foppensis, or the Fop Display’d, addressed to a one who has not travelled and, not having read Cicero’s Offices, ‘sets up for a beau’.2
A preface, presumably by himself, remarks ‘how the world is altered among us, since foreign manners, the luxury . . . has universally obtained among us, corrupting ancient simplicity’. Mary obviously had a shrewd wit, a keen and sceptical view of the fashionable world, though her verses make a poor burlesque; her title page carries two lines of Juvenal and a taut English translation (by Evelyn?), nicely turned to the world she tried to satirize: ‘Such care for a becoming dress they take, / As if their life and honour were at stake’. Evelyn’s affection for Mary is touching, and his own contribution, more trenchant than her octosyllabics, is appended as The Fop-dictionary, or ‘An alphabetical catalogue of the hard and foreign names and terms of the art cosmetic, &c together with Their Interpretations, for instruction of the Unlearned’. Ever eager to instruct, it contrives a few hits at précieuse follies: ‘MOUCHOIRE. It were rude, vulgar, and unseemly to call it handkerchief,’ or faux Frenchifed pronunciation in ‘TOILET. Corruptly called the twilight, but ordinarily signifying a little cloth.’
Another daughter, Elizabeth, distressed by her sister’s death yet excluded from her parents’ grief, had eloped with a man working at Deptford dockyard, married, and fallen ill, again with smallpox. She was nursed by her mother once again, until God was ‘pleased to take her out of this vale of misery’. The father of Evelyn’s wife also died suddenly, aged nearly eighty, in February 1683. But Evelyn’s surviving daughter, Susanna, was married in April 1693 to William Draper, a marriage welcomed by all the family.3 The modest ceremony was held at Holborn, not Wotton, and was conducted by an Evelyn friend, Thomas Tenison, Bishop of Lincoln, with Francis (Margaret Godolphin’s son) as one of the pages, and a young Tuke, though Catholic, as bridesmaid.
But his son John was Evelyn’s gravest burden. By the time he died in 1699, aged 44, though depressed and gloomy, he had much redeemed himself in his father’s eyes. In his youth he left Evelyn frequently distressed by his lack of application, his debts, his drinking (even taunting his father with tales of excessive drinking at Wotton), his unhappiness when forced to be at Sayes Court, his inability to be what his father wanted – a better version of the five-year-old Richard whose virtues were celebrated in Evelyn’s The Golden Book. John received the best education from tutors, being first taught by Milton’s nephew, Edward Philips, and then by Ralph Bohun, who became a good family friend and looked after him at Oxford, and with his father organized John’s educational regime. John was admitted to the Middle Temple, but gave up his studies, evidently lacking any self-discipline. He also seems to have been socially self-conscious, suffering from crooked legs, the irons on which he depended concealed beneath long coats. In 1675 John was dispatched to Paris in the company of Lord and Lady Berkeley on their diplomatic mission, under the watchful eye of his father’s friend Margaret Blagge. But he was bored by life there, apparently treated almost as a servant and not involved in any of the various Berkeley activities. Professing an interest in languages, he asked leave to travel, as his father had once done through Europe, but Evelyn refused and brought him home. Evelyn was clearly thinking of John in 1679 when he dispatched a long letter to the Countess of Sunderland (LB, II.625–8) that argued, contrary to his own earlier advocacy of the virtues of travel, that, at least for her own sons, travel abroad of ‘susceptible youths’ found them quickly involved in ‘profane and filthy communication, atheistical, negligent and extravagant talk, which passes now amongst our most generous youth’. He lectured John endlessly, with instructions on morality, the need to find employment outside the court and eventually, when he got married to Martha Spence, with marital advice and the seriousness of the sacrament he was undertaking.
The marriage settled John, and he resumed his studies at the Middle Temple, leaving his wife and son at Sayes Court. An early venture into translation, whether inclined or pushed by his father, of Rapin’s poem on gardens, was followed in the 1680s by translations of a volume of Plutarch’s Lives and Grotius, his Arguments. Government posts were hard to obtain, yet he obtained one briefly in the Treasury, then a more permanent posting in 1692 to Ireland in Customs and Excise through the good offices of Sidney Godolphin; John left his son, Jack, in Deptford with his parents, but took his young daughter and wife with him to Ireland. He developed a love of books and paintings, and his own Jack promised exceeding well, and would eventually go to Eton and Oxford. But John had never been in good health and was often depressed by the time of his death in 1699. Knowing by then that he would have no son to succeed George at Wotton, Evelyn saw his grandson Jack, born in March 1682, as the inheritor of his own taste and of the family estate.
While Evelyn had always been willing to observe other faiths during his tour of Europe, he was steadfast in his dedication to the English Church. Yet the slow, but increasingly obvious, growth of Roman Catholicism at the court and among the king’s advisers offended him deeply: ‘the truth is, the Roman church [is] exceeding bold, and busy everywhere.’ His Diary records Parliament ‘being now alarmed with the whole nation, about a conspiracy of some eminent papists, for the destruction of the king, & by introducing popery’ (IV.153–4). This was the Popish Plot, fabricated by Titus Oates and a confederate, but it was nonetheless capable of inflaming a real anti-Catholic fervour against the Jesuits, whom Oates had said were trying to kill the king. Evelyn had already translated The New Heresy of the Jesuits in 1667 and, though suspicious of Oates’s veracity, was exceedingly worried when a Jesuit secretary of the Duchess of York accused the queen of wanting to kill the king. The secretary was tried and executed, and Parliament passed a Test Act to exclude all Roman Catholics from sitting in the Commons or the Lords, with the exception of the Duke of York himself, well known to be a Catholic. When the Commons later voted against York’s ‘recusancy’, James retreated with his duchess to the Spanish Netherlands. A further scare, the ‘Protestant Plot’ of 1683, disturbed Evelyn even more, and he blamed the English for having betrayed the Dutch in the late wars.
In February 1685 Charles II died, and Evelyn heard from Pepys that he had received the Catholic last rites, though doubted the evidence that he was shown. On the day of Charles’s funeral, the new king, the former Duke of York, shocked Evelyn by attending Mass, and in March Evelyn saw an oratory set up in the king’s lodging – ‘mass being publically said, & the Romanists swarming at Court’ (Diary, IV.419). Though James professed his willingness to defend the Church of England ‘as by law established’, rebellions in the Highlands and by the Protestant Duke of Monmouth in the West Country did not augur a smooth reign, though they were quickly put down. Evelyn seemed pleased at first with the king’s person, but lamented the larger political scene and wished that James ‘were of the national religion’ (Diary, IV.230). He feared for the French Protestants after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, and as a Commissioner for the Privy Council he refused permission to publish popish books, or managed to absent himself from crucial meetings to deny it a quorum. A new Catholic Chapel at Whitehall was opened in 1687 with unabashed ritual and homage to the papacy. James tried to court nonconformists and Quakers to include them with Catholics in a general toleration, and required all bishops to read his Declaration of Indulgence; many refused. There seemed no prospect of a peaceful resolution and increasingly there was fear that another civil war was brewing. James, realizing that his own daughter was married to a possible successor, the Protestant William of Orange, fluctuated between allowing a restoration of ejected Protestant fellows in Oxford and staffing his army with Catholic officers, mainly from Ireland. James shifted as best he could. People switched religions according to pressure and circumstance, hence the satire of the Vicar of Bray, who altered his religion when the monarch changed his.
The final months of James’s reign were messy and muddled, and the result – the Glorious, but bloodless, Revolution – is well known. Long before this was accomplished, overtures had already been made to William of Orange in the Netherlands and his English consort, Mary. Evelyn was, as usual, somewhat uncertain about the likely outcome, and prayed that God would step in and ‘settle truth and peace amongst us again’. A variety of different political suggestions were being aired as to how England should be governed. But as Bowle notes in John Evelyn and His World (p. 201), ‘events were making up Evelyn’s own royalist mind’. He was undoubtedly glad both that civil war was avoided, though armies were moved about England without engaging, and that a Protestant prince and his English wife had come to the thrones of Great Britain. He sent his son John to greet the Prince of Orange, and watched James II, guarded by Dutch soldiers, taken to a boat and dispatched via Rochester for France. The Commons addressed ‘the great question of Government’ (Diary, IV.616) and urged the Lords to crown William of Orange; the Lords tried for a regency of twelve bishops, but this was narrowly defeated. The arrival of William and Mary was feted in Deptford and across the land, and George Evelyn’s son, also George, died from an ‘apoplectic fit’ after drinking to celebrate the Glorious Revolution. Nobody exactly knew where James had got to, and not all the bishops were happy with this disposal of a consecrated monarch; even Evelyn thought the ‘temper’ of the new king ‘slothful sickly’. Evelyn, now aged 69 in September 1689, was not optimistic (‘what government next? Regal or by Election?’).
An essential component of Evelyn’s domesticity, as he knew well himself, had been his wife and her own resolute faith and domestic probity. Their early marriage, when Mary was thirteen and he twenty-six, proved both a success and a lifelong support for him, though Darley (John Evelyn, p. 95), foreswearing hindsight, calls it a ‘gamble’; maybe Evelyn himself realized shrewdly how good a choice he had made. His zeal to instruct surely imposed much pedagogical earnestness upon her, and his desire to do so that is apparent in his early letters, as well as the Instructions Oeconimiques, leads Darley (p. 73) to write that it was more ‘suggestive of those between a school master and pupil than young lovers’. But Mary possessed something from the start that never left her: a social ease and intellectual skill learned in the cosmopolitan world of France, Paris especially, where she much enjoyed herself and which she was reluctant to leave, not least because her new husband was being urged to stay out of England. Her portrait by Robert Nanteuil, taken while she was still in France, gives nothing away about her future, except perhaps her youthful and steady gaze, which she inherited from her parents (illus. 42).4 Yet in 1657, when William Rand was translating Gassendi’s Life of Peiresc and dedicating it to Evelyn, he also went out of his way to celebrate Mary for her ‘English gravity, being moderately [that is, in moderation] allayed, sweetened and spirited, by the mettlesome air and education of France’, which has brought her to ‘such a perfection, as to be no hindrance, but a meet help to her beloved lord, in his most many concernments’. Dedicatory epistles, especially then, could be overwrought; but this seems nothing but an inspired appreciation of genuine worth, and Rand’s testimony was to be constantly confirmed.
Mary was both independent and dutiful, a combination that takes real skill at any time. Impatient with any intellectual or social affectation, she was forthright and often witty in writing to family, like her cousin, the Catholic Samuel Tuke, or her son’s former tutor at Oxford, the bachelor Ralph Bohun, a fervent anti-papist.5 Wry and solicitous in ways that may still surprise us, she is coolly dispassionate in describing to Tuke her solitary life at Sayes Court (‘a philosopher, a woman, and a child, heaps of books’); but she could also tell Bohun of her exasperation at her husband’s need to satisfy ‘his seraphick who deserves that and anything a thousand times better’. Yet after the death of the ‘seraphick’ Margaret Godolphin (née Blagge), Mary could evenhandedly note that, though ‘not in the first rank of [Mary’s] friendship’, Margaret ‘combined the grace of a lady of the court with the sincerity and innocence of a primitive Christian’ (Darley, John Evelyn, pp. 232, 252). That ‘primitive’ is both shrewd and graceful and yet extremely sharp. She was loyal too in ways that others might have found unconventional: after the death of Pepys’s wife, whereupon Pepys cohabited for the rest of his life with Mrs Skinner, his housekeeper, Mary joined her husband in meeting and always greeting the pair kindly. She alone seems to have forgiven her daughter Elizabeth for eloping, which Evelyn never did, even after her death from smallpox.
On her return to England with John, Mary failed to obtain a position at court with the Portuguese queen (a lost opportunity that she may eventually have appreciated), and this gave her the chance to involve herself wholly in the life of Sayes Court, not neglecting her friends, but producing four sons, only one of whom survived into adulthood, and three daughters. When her husband was frequently away, especially during the Dutch wars and during his necessary attendance at court, she managed the property, some of the interior rebuilding with extreme care, as well as directing garden maintenance. As daughter, wife, mother and companion, she seemed a perfect example of an intelligent and accomplished seventeenth-century woman – a painter and miniaturist; a musician; an elegant writer who involved herself in her husband’s work by helping him with his translations from the French, which she spoke fluently, and talking with him about the sick and wounded during the Dutch wars; and capable of designing the frontispiece for his translation of Lucretius as well as being skilled in the domestic realms of kitchen and household medicine. It is difficult for anyone in the twenty-first century to gauge her completely within her own context. Evelyn said she was ‘the best wife in the world, sweet, and (though not charming) agreeable and as she grew up pious, loyal & of so just a temper’. Darley (John Evelyn, p. 73) writes that this ‘hardly does her justice’, and it was not particularly fulsome; but I like that phrase – ‘(though not charming) agreeable’, since it speaks of her potential to be wry and even ironical as well as agreeable, which her letters often reveal. Bohun got it absolutely right, though, when he acknowledged, with a wit she’d have appreciated, that ‘you perform that [that is, your wifely duties] in a silent closet which whole courts and theatres would unanimously applaud’ (quoted Darley, John Evelyn, p. 95). That opposition of self-performing stage and sycophantic court to the home (and its fleeting allusion to a closet or cabinet, which she herself possessed) is particularly telling. She was tolerant, wry, in private even satirical, about some of her husband’s female friends, especially Margaret Cavendish, Marchioness of Newcastle. But she faced her greatest challenge in dealing with the other Margaret, in which she surpassed herself. This episode has elicited a variety of explanations and narratives about the middle-aged Evelyn, but it bears some examination for the light it can throw upon aspects of his domesticity.
42 Robert Nanteuil, Mary Evelyn, née Browne, late 1640s.
The friendship with Margaret Blagge was a ‘seraphic love’, platonic, yet suffused with Christian values. ‘Seraphic love’ had been discussed, among others, by Evelyn’s Royal Society colleague Robert Boyle in Some Motives to the Love of God, better known as Seraphick Love (with four editions in the 1660s). But Boyle, as a bachelor, managed the discussion more easily than Evelyn would do in practice: Darley rightly observes that such love was easier ‘to define on the page’ than to navigate through the realities of emotions and ‘sexual attractions’ (John Evelyn, p. 240). The relationship became an unexpected disruption of Evelyn’s family life.
Margaret Blagge was a maid of honour at court when Evelyn first met her in 1669, and found her (as he would write of her in his Life) ‘humble, religious and serious’, not liable to tease (for he seems to have feared mockery). His short yet sustained and passionate friendship with her was subsequently narrated in The Life of Mrs Godolphin, after her marriage to Sidney Godolphin and her death in childbirth a few years later; this manuscript – more a hagiography than conventional biography – was eventually given to her widower, but published only in 1847. The narrative was composed with the hindsight of being able to give his own role in their friendship a suitably pious and ethical perspective, though he was at times honest enough to realize the extent to which he or their joint friendship had been fraught. This revisionism was in tune with some of his own attempts to shape his story towards the end of his life, variously in recasting his Diary retrospectively and in establishing the carefully edited and annotated letterbooks.
When published in 1847, The Life of Mrs Godolphin was welcomed by its readers as a truly Victorian tale of manly piety and decorous friendship towards a woman marked by her conscious devotion to God and the queen she served.6 Subsequent responses have been made in the light of a different readership, hence Virginia Woolf’s tart and somewhat trivializing essay of 1920, ‘Rambling Round Evelyn’ (published in The Common Reader, 1925), with its ‘Poor Mrs Godolphin . . . whom he celebrated in a sincere and touching biography’ and whose ‘habits of an angel’ did not present her friendship with Evelyn in ‘an alluring light’. Keynes thought the Life ‘charming and a characteristic production’, which is somewhat anodyne. Hence, too, W. G. Hiscock’s Freudian John Evelyn and Margaret Godolphin of 1951. In 1981 Bowle, by contrast, moves smoothly and quickly through this whole episode, noting their almost childish companionship while visiting the poor together, viewing cabinets and an exhibition called ‘Paradise Transplanted and Restored’, their shared devotions, his willingness to help her with finances and making a will, and Evelyn’s being persuaded by her to manage the elaborate affairs of Lord Berkeley, when he and his wife were sent, along with Margaret and accompanied by his son John, on an embassy to Paris. After Evelyn belatedly learned of her marriage to Godolphin, and found his complacency was ‘shaken’, he nevertheless renewed their friendship, helping them to refurbish an apartment in Whitehall. She died horribly, aged 25, ‘in raging delirium’, and after despairing for this ‘most excellent, and most estimable friend that ever lived’ he continued a relationship with the widower. Evelyn’s narrative, Bowle writes, ‘reveals himself rather more than in most of his generally guarded writings’ and emphasizes his ‘extreme humility’.
Twenty years further on, Frances Harris’s Transformations of Love brings into play a more feminized view, where both Evelyn himself and the male culture of the Restoration court become central. Her narrative of the friendship and life of Evelyn and Margaret Godolphin is based on an intimate knowledge of the relevant material, and with a keen and shrewd eye for court culture.7 Darley, writing four years after Harris, brings to this ‘affair’ a tact and brevity that both defers to Harris and yet moves past it quickly. In the end, and at this distance and with the opportunity to (mis)read Evelyn’s Life, much remains obscure or ambiguous, caught between Hiscock’s unconvincing Freudian version of Margaret’s neurosis and our own scepticisms with ‘seraphic’ love. Yet the narrative is still frustrated on many counts: by the obliquity of some of the letters between them, by the lacunae that are inevitably found in written communications between people who talk frequently to each other, the unwritten thoughts they might have intuited, and by the tensions between a married man and a woman already promised to another man; these were tensions that both tried to understand but did not fully articulate. Today, all of this must be fleshed out with due narrative smoothness, hence our recourse to the ‘perhaps’, the ‘must have’, the ‘suggests’, by which a story is allowed a completeness and convincing authority in the twenty-first century.
What is clear, though, is that it was undoubtedly a deep and platonic friendship, what Jeremy Taylor in his ‘Discourse on Friendship’ deemed ‘the nearest love and the nearest society of which the persons are capable’. A ‘seraphic’ relationship could yet from time to time be misjudged by either of the parties or even misappropriated in local conditions or events. Evelyn first noted Margaret in his Diary of 28 June 1669: ‘my wife being gone a journey of pleasure down the river as far as the sea, with Mrs Howard, & her daughters the Maids of Honour, amongst whom, that excellent creature Mrs Blagge’. He celebrated her wit and intelligence, her obvious piety and her careful measuring of her life at court, where as a maid of honour there were responsibilities above all to herself, but also to the court, and to obtaining a husband (one of the prime occupations for a maid of honour, especially when the resources of her royalist Suffolk family made that acquisition imperative). By 1671 she was committed to a marriage with Stephen Godolphin. Yet he was much involved with finding a place at court or in government administration – which he eventually would do with various and important posts in the Treasury after her death, but was meanwhile absorbed in precisely the activities (gambling and racing horses) that Margaret Blagge found reprehensible and wished he would reform before their marriage. At times she committed herself simply to wait ‘till God is pleased to dispose of me, one way or the other’ (quoted in Harris’s Transformations of Love, p. 213).
On Evelyn’s part, he always found congenial the role of pedagogy or instruction, not least because he had been himself largely self-taught and wished now to help others. This propensity revealed itself in several lengthy and careful pieces of advice that he composed, not only for his wife, but for others: for his wife on their marriage he addressed his Instructions Oeconomiques, later for his daughter he wrote ‘Directions for the Employment of your time’, and similar advices for his son before his marriage to Martha Spencer; he also penned a small volume for John on his departure for a post in Ireland in 1692, with advice on religion and ‘profitable Entertainment’; and when he knew he would be leaving Wotton to his grandson, Jack, he wrote ‘Memories for my Grand-son’. The letterbooks of the 1680s and 1690s contain many communications of moral, ethical and religious direction, career suggestions and careful admonishings, as well as warm, exemplary and elaborate expressions of sorrow for deaths of people Evelyn had known, both within the extended family and in society at large. Much inclined to be in loco parentis, with a family to groom and especially a son whom he assumed would continue the cadet branch of the Evelyn family, it was a role he could readily assume with Margaret Blagge.
It was also natural enough that in 1676 he would, though at her request, address Margaret Godolphin with his lengthy ‘Oeconomics to a Newly Married Friend’, attaching Mary Evelyn’s own advice on housekeeping; he wrote that Margaret herself had told him, ‘You are the first friend I ever had and ever shall be so.’8 Margaret was an adult and gifted young woman, whereas his own girls had come late into his family, and were still young. He would also find out that Margaret’s own birthday was exactly the same as that of the much lamented Richard, so she became a substitute offspring. And since Evelyn was also in need of some formal role in government administration, it was inadvisable to cut himself off entirely from the royal circle; so her life at court gave him some opportunities for them to meet, some sense of proximity to the court and reasons for judging it, even discovering in her life there some possibility of right conduct; as he noted, an English churchman could still manage to become a courtier. And his frequent friendship with other women – Lady Sylvius, Lady Sunderland, Lady Arlington – with names sometimes taken from pastorals and conducted with spirit, tact and deliberate self-consciousness, was also something of a precedent. But Margaret Blagge’s need for a high-minded and yet emotional friendship at the age of twenty and for the guidance that she herself sought were intense and were readily, if slowly, answered on his part. His claim that she first solicited his friendship and help is of course made in Evelyn’s own life of her, but is a piece, writes Darley (John Evelyn, p. 240), of ‘matchless self-delusion’, though Evelyn himself recalls that Margaret’s invitation was ‘her very expressions to me’; that again could be post-rationalization.
43 ‘The Altar of Friendship’, drawn by Evelyn and inscribed with ‘be this the Symbol of our Inviolable friendship’ by him and Margaret Blagge, from the 1939 edition of the Life of Mrs Godolphin by Harriet Sampson. A manuscript copy of this Life in the Houghton Library at Harvard (see illus. 44) does not include this image.
This relationship, as Frances Harris has well documented, was at the time seen as ‘seraphic’. Such a relationship was idealistic, and as idealism it could be contaminated by misunderstanding and circumstance: ‘Blameless innocence’ (Evelyn’s phrase) is beset by experience, as William Blake would know. Margaret could treat him at first as her ‘most constant and loving playfellow’, but for both of them, though in different ways, this lightheartedness moved into something deeper and perhaps ‘uncontrolled feeling’ (Transformations of Love, p. 164); long letters were exchanged (some of hers she asked later to be returned). Evelyn, ‘not satisfied with a verbal pledge’ of friendship from Margaret (Transformations of Love, p. 151), himself made a drawing of an ‘altar of friendship’ (illus. 34) and invited her to inscribe it as a ‘symbol of Inviolable Friendship’, and date and sign it ‘for my brother Evelyn’.9 After she decided to leave the court and take up residence with the Berkeleys, Evelyn accompanied her everywhere; they exchanged portraits, and he helped her to cultivate her private devotional faith. All the while Margaret was urging Sidney to become a more responsible and pious person, and Mary was keeping a careful eye on her husband’s activity. Of course, the closer and more intense these meetings became, the more opportunity there was to quarrel, to be bewildered, or even to strain against the careful disciplines of a seraphic friendship.
While Evelyn urged her often to think of marriage to Godolphin and found pious reassurances to recommend it, she herself worried about whether even marriage was to be preferred to some, always unspecified, cloistered retreat (not being a Catholic, a nunnery abroad would not serve). When she did suddenly take the plunge, it was after an obviously painful role in a court masque, when rehearsals endlessly distracted her from her own devotions: to act as the chaste Diana in a court that was conspicuously lewd and corrupt was not a role she relished, even if she could remain slightly aloof from the performance. This episode is fully and convincingly narrated by Frances Harris.10 From this unappetizing court entertainment Margaret fled into a quickly arranged and private ceremony with Godolphin that none of her family, nor Evelyn, were told of until later. Darley (John Evelyn, p. 246) also seems to think that the ‘catalyst’ for her sudden decision to marry was that being required to accompany Lord and Lady Berkeley to Paris she would be leaving Godolphin behind. Soon afterwards, when she left with the Berkeleys, Evelyn accompanied her to Dover, where, still unaware of her new status and with Godolphin remaining at court, Margaret actually told him in parting that ‘if ever I return again, and do not marry, I shall retire,’ a harmful yet necessary deceit when the marriage had still not been announced. But Evelyn would later write that it was the only time she had ever ‘prevaricated with me’. She must eventually, upon returning to England, have told her sisters that she was married, and one of them, either deliberately on her behalf, or by accident, told Evelyn. He was inevitably much distressed; I would venture that distress was caused as much by her lack of confidence in him as by his repressed and perhaps frustrated love for her as a ‘daughter’.
During this extended friendship Mary Evelyn knew and met Margaret on several occasions in London and at Sayes Court. All along Margaret had been a friend of Evelyn’s family, with Mary always welcoming her and Godolphin at Deptford, though privately and occasionally caustic, as when she commented to Bohun that Margaret’s role of Diana in the court masque must have constrained her ‘severity’ (Transformations of Love , p. 231). On one occasion at least she made clear, yet with some irony, that her husband show his presence at Sayes Court and not in the ‘glorious court’ and that she herself had ‘a little interest in you, and possibly, am kindly thought of by you’.11 Evelyn’s own piety escalated in step with Margaret’s: at the height of the friendship he asked Mary to let him sleep apart so as to ‘vacate to holy and solemn offices’ (quoted Transformations of Love, p. 202). But once Margaret’s marriage to Godolphin was announced and recognized, Mary was welcoming and, at the time of Margaret’s own confinement, fever and final death, she was a visitor and helper in finding doctors and midwives. Mary was genuinely touched by Margaret’s death in childbirth and careful to send Godolphin her support and yet her hope that he had not hurt himself by too much brooding on his sorrow.
At her own insistence Margaret was to be buried at the ancestral Godolphin home in Cornwall, and Evelyn took care of the arrangements in London, engraving the brass plate on the lead coffin and inscribing it with the pentacle by which he had always signalled his seraphic friendship and the motto ‘Un Dieu, Un Amy’ (one god, one friend). He followed the hearse and its six horses as far as Hounslow, and then turned back, not to Sayes Court but to London, where he helped Godolphin, who felt unable to make the journey, to clear their lodgings. He pledged his friendship to Godolphin in person and by letter once he had returned to Deptford. Godolphin asked him to continue to supervise the finances for Margaret’s little boy, even as he was himself pulled back into the affairs of court and eventually into a commission at the Treasury. In that position, as he had promised Evelyn all along, he would endeavour to assist him with the financial matters relating to both the lease of Sayes Court and the monies owed to his father-in-law.
Godolphin’s eagerness for life in government administration and his relish of courtly activities had been a contested area with his late wife. But it pulled him again, if reluctantly and perhaps guiltily, into circles around the court. Yet his work in the Treasury actually caused a severe rupture in his good relations with Evelyn that was never wholly mended. An administrative decision taken by the Commissioners refused to convert the lease of Sayes Court into freehold, which greatly annoyed Evelyn, not least because his own family could not believe that a powerful friend like Godolphin had not helped him. It not only soured any relationship with Godolphin, but forced him to reconsider exactly what his relations with Godolphin’s wife had been before and after her marriage. Despite further entreaties, Evelyn found no immediate help in that quarter, though later it was settled, perhaps with Godolphin’s assistance.
44 Opening page of a manuscript of Evelyn’s Life of Mrs Godolphin (1684), written at the request of Lady Sylvius.
An early request by Godolphin for Evelyn to compose a memorial for Margaret did not progress – doubtless evidence of Evelyn’s own ambivalence on what exactly he would write. But a request by one of her friends in 1684 settled him to the task once again. He addressed the Life specially to her, Lady Anne Sylvius, née Howard (illus. 44), and handed his manuscript to her in December of 1684. Four years later he retrieved it, made a presentation copy of it in his own hand, and eventually gave it to Godolphin in 1702.12
With the latter he maintained an uneasy relationship: Godolphin was unwell after his wife’s death, but later returned to the Treasury under William III, rose to be prime minister under Queen Anne, and became good friends with the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough. Contact with Evelyn was infrequent and stilted, though the young John was helped to a post by Godolphin.
Yet Evelyn still harped on some further connection with Margaret: he had once told Mary that he would have loved it if one of his granddaughters might be married to Margaret’s son, Francis. In the end, he achieved something of a similar match by seeing his grandson Jack, of whom he was especially fond, marry Anne Boscawen, in whose company Francis had grown up.
