EARLY IN THE 1690S, John Evelyn knew that he would be inheriting Wotton. His brother George, after the loss in 1692 of his only surviving son, also called John, had no surviving male heirs, so the estate would pass by entail to Evelyn. Yet his first thought was to comfort his brother on his loss. He eventually confirmed formally the reversion of Wotton to himself; later, since he would also himself lose his only surviving son, John, in 1699, he realized that Wotton would go eventually to his grandson, Jack.
Thus when George himself died later that year, on 4 October 1699, Evelyn now found himself with home, house, gardens, woodlands and an estate estimated at 7,500 acres and with a useful rent roll – ‘Far from my least expectation, or desert’. At the same time, he had a double obligation to see that Jack was instructed in the importance and significance of his inheritance and that the estate was to be left in a better condition than when he inherited it. Evelyn made a new will,1 and in 1704 compiled his ‘Memoires’ for Jack (his last flourish of instructional family advice): this is a veritable manual of domestic probity, of estate management and – by the end – of theology and of what books of devotion to be read. It is a document that, though intended to ensure that Wotton would be in good hands and well maintained, must have been somewhat unnecessary for a 22-year-old, who had absorbed much of these matters already.
On 4 May 1694 Evelyn’s Diary records that
I went this day, with my wife & 3 servants from Sayes Court, & removing much furniture of all sorts, books, pictures, hangings, bedding &c: to furnish the apartment my brother assigned; & now after more than 40 years, to spend the rest of my days with [my brother] at Wotton, where I was born, leaving my house, & 3 servants at my house in Deptford (full furnished) to my son-in-law Draper.
Later he told Pepys that ‘I pass the day in the fields among horses and oxen, sheep and cows, bulls and sows,’ and that the family was enjoying a ‘very sorry conversation among the bumpkins’, and they were devouring ‘plum-pie, pottage and brawn all holy-days’; but in the cold of January they had the comfort of ‘luculent fires in most of the rooms’; otherwise, ‘we live in heathen-darkness . . . and shall become barbars in a short time’ if he did not receive any letters’.2 He did however find pleasure in communicating with William Wotton, tutor at nearby Albury, a prodigy whose friendliness and learning he greatly appreciated and with whom he shared ideas of ancient and modern gardening (writing to Pepys, LB, II.1027). But Evelyn missed being closer to London, though he managed to return there from time to time. Later he and Mary would keep themselves informed by taking turns to ‘read the packets of all the news sent constantly from London, which serves us for discourse till fresh news comes’ (Introduction by the editor, Diary, I.89).
William Draper, his son-in-law, managed Sayes Court for a while, though the family envisaged renting it to anyone who would maintain the garden. Eventually it was let first to Admiral Benbow, from whom a short lease was obtained by Peter the Great, who wished to reside nearby when inspecting the shipbuilding at Deptford. Whether or not the tsar did indeed push a wheelbarrow through Evelyn’s holly hedges, as was reported, when he left Sayes Court it was badly damaged inside and out, and on behalf of the Treasury Christopher Wren and George London were sent to assess the costs to be awarded to Evelyn and to Benbow for damaged furnishing. Evelyn also made a visit in June 1698 to ‘view how miserably the Tsar of Moscovy had left my house after 3 months’, and he reported the damage in the revised 1706 edition of Sylva that he was preparing. He visited Sayes Court again in March 1701, when the property was again rented, this time to Lord Carnarvon, and once more in June 1705 to visit another tenant.
Before George Evelyn died, short of funds, he asked John to pay rent for the family’s apartment at Wotton. But there were debts that John also needed to pay off, as well as providing a dowry for his daughter Susanna in her marriage to William Draper in 1693. Further, as Evelyn’s debts now belonged to the Wotton estate, they were also being pursued by George, and the entail was even called into question by his daughter, Lady Mary Wyche. George’s son-in-law, Sir Cyril Wyche, filled Wotton with his servants and horses after returning from a post in Ireland in 1695. So Evelyn and Mary took refuge for a while with their son in London. Nor, when George died in 1699, did he leave Wotton without further complications, having bequeathed to his brother only his personal possessions, library and family portraits, while appointing his daughter, Lady Wyche, as his executrix. She organized a vast funeral, writing over 2,000 local gentry, the extravagance of which shocked Evelyn, who retreated again to London. In January 1701 he returned to find the house emptied, cleared by sale or disposal of George’s furniture. With a solicitor’s assistance he was able to argue that the fishponds and pigeon-houses always went with inheritance, and that no ‘fixed vessels’ (cisterns or copper basins) were in fact ‘moveable’ items. Yet he was forced to buy back equipment for the farm, along with cocks, hens, hogs and ducks to stock it.
So the return to Wotton, much as it pleased him and had been urged upon him by his son John, was not altogether straightforward or pleasant.3 What concerned him deeply, despite the problems in resuming the family home, was to establish it as a model of architecture, gardening and estate management, yet also one that respected its appropriate status and place in the world. He had told George in 1692 that all he wished for at Wotton was to care and supervise the gardens and to bring it, after so many years of abandonment, to be worthy of the family estate.
The estate and garden at Wotton had declined considerably by the end of the seventeenth century, with much woodland felled and not replenished; Evelyn told his grandson in 1704 that Wotton was ‘naked and ashamed almost to own its name’ (that is, its toponym about woods). Yet at the start of his stewardship, George had done well. A record of the large Tudor house ‘as it was in 1640’, before he revised the garden, was sketched by his younger brother (illus. 45). It shows a rambling sequence of gabled roofs and chimneys, mullioned windows, and a note to indicate the room in which he was born. A walk across the front of this southern aspect leads from a pavilion in a small garden at the east towards ‘a pheasant garden’ on the west; a little summerhouse overlooks the moat, and facing the house is a mound of trees (on which is noted ‘here is now the grotto’4); on one side of and beyond the building are ‘meadows’ and an ‘upper garden’. Another sketch (dated 1653, or perhaps noting retrospectively that the new garden was created that year) was ‘taken in perspective from the top of the grotto’ (illus. 46). It shows that George had filled in the moat, and in its place established a parterre stretching from the platform of the house to the base of the grotto mound; George himself had wanted a bowling-green, but his wife seems to have wanted a garden. Along both sides of this central space are terraces with steps leading down onto the parterre, and a fountain is in its centre. Beyond the immediate garden are a pond to the west and a fruit garden to the east, with hilly, wooded countryside beyond. Another sketch taken from the east (illus. 47) shows the triple platforms of the mound above the grotto, which is faced with a classical facade of four pillars. The parterre is regular, but not particularly ‘Italianate’ (as it has been described), with geometrical beds marked by columns or plinths at the corners and with lateral terraces of the sort that were by then common in England.5 The grotto and steep mounds are, however, more Continental; the grotto front and what appear to be matching entries at either end of the mount (as in illus. 47, though these no longer exist) are also classical, and the clearest evidence of a ‘color Romanus’. George’s hopes for the grotto interior and his soliciting of help for its decoration from John show clear evidence that Evelyn had understood grotto work in both France and especially in Italy and advised his brother accordingly; the latter worried that such materials were not easily obtainable in England, and, in the end, the interior did not get built as they had envisaged.
45 Sketch of Wotton Park as it was once.
46 Wotton, from the top of the mount, in an etching of 1653 by John Evelyn.
By the 1690s Evelyn’s concern, as he explained to his brother in 1694 with an accompanying sketch, would be to have a grove of evergreens, and the need to build a modest conservatory to shelter oranges and myrtles during the winters. In 1695 he listed the ‘tools bought since I came into Surrey for my garden grove at Wotton’ – usual items, like a wheelbarrow, hoes, rakes, spades, with a ‘quadrant level for banks & alleys’, a foot measure and a ‘large wooden compass’;6 this suggests some further ambition to reorganize or rectify the garden and establish a new evergreen grove. He was still planting an elm walk in 1701.
47 Distant view of the mount at Wotton Park.
Evidently around 1700 Evelyn envisioned remodelling or replacing the old Tudor house with a modern front that echoed the earlier mount, which his sketch shows in the background across the parterre (illus. 48). It is a quasi-Palladian scheme with lateral wings, out of which spring two matching ranges of offices on two sides of a courtyard, through which a drive leads across a road and through a hemicyclical ‘base court’ (reminiscent of what he had inserted into Sayes Court after the bad winter of 1685–6). This scheme, which would have brought his earlier enthusiasm for modern, European architecture to his family home, was never implemented. A later painting of 1739 by George Lambert (illus. 49) reveals what the house and gardens still looked like during the tenure of Wotton under his grandson, 33 years after Evelyn’s death. It is indeed striking that we have a useful collection of images of Wotton house, gardens and their setting within a wooded landscape (see also illus. 2–3, 6), but none of Sayes Court except the important plans of his design of the grounds (see illus. 17, 20): at Sayes Court he was focused therefore on its design and planting, but at Wotton it is both the complex itself and his wish to memorialize it that seems to have mattered.
48 A proposed modern revamping of Wotton House.
49 George Lambert, Wotton in Surrey, oil painting of 1739.
In these last years he was once again working on publications. In 1693 appeared the translation of La Quintinie’s The Compleat Gard’ner, and four years later his book on medals, Numismata. Both return to some of his early enthusiasms: most obviously to ideas of foreign gardening layouts and maintenance and their usefulness in England, but also to a related topic that he had raised with Pepys in an extremely long letter of 1689 on medals and how a library might best be adorned with historical and instructive images of illustrious men (Particular Friends, pp. 188–204).
La Quintinie’s Instructions pour les jardins, fruitiers et potagers was published first in 1690, with a second edition two years later. It was a topic of particular interest to Evelyn, but the author had died before completing it, which prompted Evelyn to add a piece on melons, and a translation of La Quintinie’s ‘Treatise of Orange Trees’; he had known La Quintinie, the chief gardener of Louis XIV, since he visited Sayes Court in 1670, as he notes in his own section on melons. Evelyn’s is a handsome folio in two volumes, but now well illustrated, with eleven full-page or folding plates, eleven engravings (illus. 50) and four woodcuts. The frontispiece is a portrait of La Quintinie, and the first folding plate, immediately before his initial chapter, is a plan of the Jardin du Roi at Versailles, where he was director; this is captioned and numbered to indicate the sites where the various fruits and vegetables were grown and maintained. And that now is evidently Evelyn’s central concern, a book (he told his brother in March 1693) that was ‘for use not for show & parade’ (BL, Add. MS 78291). Indeed, the book he translates and introduces largely eschews many of the materials on design or the significance of gardens that he projected for ‘Elysium Britannicum’; a similar emphasis sustains the publication in 1699 of one segment of that magnum opus, his Acetaria, a work that concerns ‘salads’ and ‘pot herbs’. So he is promoting his translation of La Quintinie’s book, which had been justly praised in France, so that ‘we can and are able to perform matters that have amenities and advantages peculiar to our own [nation], which neither France, nor any other country can attain to’ (my italics).
50 An engraved headpiece from Jean de La Quintinie’s The Compleat Gard’ner, translated from the French by Evelyn (1693).
To help with the new section on melons, he had long since asked his brother-in-law William Glanville for assistance while in France in 1669;7 Glanville professed himself something of a philistine in matters of horticulture, but was received civilly by the French gardener, who managed to convey some information on the topic of raising and pruning melons that Evelyn could later use. He also obtained help in translating what was, at his advanced age, a formidable task; he told his brother that ‘I do not attribute the whole to myself’, but his publishers had allowed it to proceed ‘under my name’ (Keynes, Bibliophily, p. 224). His assistant in the work was probably George London, who had been apprenticed to John Rose, the nominal author of The English Vineyard (1666); London had later studied at Versailles, returned to be gardener for the Bishop of London and thereafter founded Brompton Nursery.8 The translation was never republished as a whole. But London, along with his Brompton Nursery partner, Henry Wise, published an abridged, one-volume edition in 1699, though without acknowledging Evelyn;9 it offered itself as ‘now compendiously abridged, and made of more use, with very considerable improvements’. This went into five subsequent editions between 1701 and 1719.
Evelyn’s ‘Advertisement’ is essentially a puff or promotion for Brompton Nursery. He salutes London and Wise for their achievements, which are superior to anything ‘I have hitherto seen, either at home or abroad; or found by reading many books published on this subject’. A walk there on a fine day, he suggests, will show ‘what a magazine these two industrious men have provided . . . such assembly I believe, as is nowhere else to be met within this kingdom’, and one that has supplied materials – particularly fruit trees – to many gardens throughout England. Yet he does note, in passing, their capabilities for design: they have attained
a sufficient mastery in lines and figures for general design, and expeditious methods for casting and leveling of grounds: and to bring them into the most apt form they are capable of; which requires a particular address, and to determine the best proportions of walks and avenues, stars, centres, &c. suitable to the lengths; and how, and with what materials whether gravel, carpet, &c. to be laid.
But they are no less capable ‘in that most useful (though less pompous part of horticulture) the potagere, meloniere, culinary garden’.
By contrast, Numismata seems an extremely odd book, and was never reprinted in any form after 1697. It was dedicated to the son of Margaret Godolphin, Francis, whose education at Eton and King’s College, Cambridge, Evelyn had supervised. That dedication, one supposes, was not undertaken lightly, yet Keynes notes that Francis, though a young man not yet twenty, might have found puzzling his former tutor’s book, which Keynes calls ‘garrulous and digressive’ (Keynes, Bibliophily, p. 233); and Keynes then quotes Horace Walpole’s criticism of its index under the letter ‘N’ – for how could a discourse of medals direct even its most curious reader to such topics as ‘Nails of the Cross, Narcotics . . . Neapolitans, their character . . . Noah, Noses . . . Nurses, of what importance their temper and disposition?’
Yet it is both ambitious and a work of some erudition, an attempt to narrate a history of modern England through a discussion of medals, ‘as they relate to history, chronology, and other parts of erudition’. Evelyn is arguing what Joseph Addison would later explain in his dialogues Upon the Usefulness of Ancient Medals (1726): that a fund of money is a fund of knowledge. This goes some way, surely, to explain the ‘digressive’ tendency of the story, but ‘garrulous’ it is not, given the format of the lengthy section on 97 medals. Portraits on one side have iconographical images on the reverse; the figures are described and identified, their costumes explained (Roman dress, for example), and the inscriptions around them and on the reverse, along with the iconographic items, are annotated and sometimes glossed with quotations from Virgil or Camden. It is in fact an economical way of expounding events, and, unlike written or painted imagery, which might be lost or destroyed, they can expound histories ‘in more lasting monument than painted cloth’ (p. 161). On one occasion, when rehearsing a segment of national history during the Civil Wars, in which Evelyn was personally involved, he uses a medal of Charles I and Henrietta Maria that was discovered ‘on a field of mine’ (p. 110; it is more likely to have been Wotton than Sayes Court, because its estate featured more conspicuously in the wars than Deptford).10 Besides the elaborate notes interpreting the medals of kings, bishops and soldiers, with their historical role and symbolic significance, Evelyn adds chapters on ‘other persons and things, worthy the memory and honor of medals’, on the usefulness of inscriptions, on how to collect and procure them, on makers of them, and one that urges collectors to find occasion to display their holdings. There are lists of scholars and divines (‘English, Irish, Scots, &c’), historians, antiquarians, philosophers, physicians, mathematicians, lawyers, ‘poets and great wits’, musicians, worthy benefactors, great travellers, and ‘imposters’ (Evelyn had himself written about these in his History of Imposters, 1669). In short, a conspectus of all those who contributed to the nation of modern England; in many cases, it is precisely those who were members of the Royal Society. Towards the end he concludes with praise of those ‘men of genius who have made this age as great as any, by experimental knowledge’ (his italics). It suggests that Evelyn’s endeavour, at an advanced age, was the need to plot, if not narrate, a turbulent history of his own country, with attention to matters religious, political, cultural and philosophical. In addition, his title page announced ‘A digression concerning Physiognomy’; it explains how different nations and climates influence how people look and behave, how different topographies produce different types (mountain people versus folk of the valley, or plains). That is a conceit that still animates W. H. Auden’s ‘In Praise of Limestone’, where different geologies have encouraged various types of human behaviour.
Stumbling and haphazard as Numismata seems, it can be read as an attempt to fulfil what ten years before he had proposed to Pepys in his lengthy discourse on medals and images of the famous. That letter had revealed an astonishing range and grasp of the topic, even if it was offered in a ‘rambling’ way. He may modestly have not wanted his own ‘shallow-head’ adorning Pepys’s library of worthies, but he thought that medals, and engravings, would ‘stand in competition with the best paintings’, and he urged a wide assembly of persons in both ‘Armes and Arts . . . Wit and Learning . . . and other instructive types’: there he lists a miscellaneous group of ‘effigies and icons of those who have made such a noise and bustle in the world, either by their madness and folly’; nor would he stop there, but would attend to many more classes of activity, such as those who fought battles, organized ‘funerals and other pomps, tombs, trials, animals, monsters; stately edifices, machines, antique vases, reliques . . . ruins and landscapes’, to some of which activity Numismata gestures in its survey of persons and iconography.
‘To the Reader’ of Numismata notes that he had started upon this book ‘almost five years since’, but finding others were addressing the subject (perhaps Obadiah Walker’s book on ancient coins) he abandoned it for a while. Then he decided that ‘there were yet some corner and little wastes’ that could be ‘dressed’ by a new approach (the landscape metaphor is telling), since ‘they relate to the conformation of some remarkable matter of fact, [they can] discover the genius of the age, and link the history of divers notorious passages of the latter centuries and revolutions’. In doing so, he may incite others ‘who have better store and opportunities of perfecting what I have first begun’, to augment his narrative.
And this is precisely what a later reader of Evelyn’s book did, though alas anonymously, with his copy of Numismata that is now in the Houghton Library at Harvard University. He annotated the text profusely in all the blank spaces – in the margins, between engravings of the medals and commentaries upon them – but not always legibly. A note by Guy de la Bédoyère (dated 1977), kept at Harvard, thinks that the annotator could be William Wotton or Ralph Thoresby, both of whom corresponded with Evelyn about medals, but decides that it is somebody who did not know him, and is therefore likely to be of the mid-eighteenth century and writing from ‘a detached and . . . scholarly point of view’. On the last page of the index, this anonymous reader has started a list of Evelyn’s writings (again barely readable), where he notes Cowley’s verses for Sylva and that he himself values the works that treat of gardening, which itself suggests an eighteenth-century reader. So he has brought his own researches and reflections on English history to extend Evelyn’s narrative, even annotating the index of Numismata. His reading of the book suggests (pace Walpole) that he recognized Evelyn’s attempt to narrate a much larger cultural history of England through the medium of coins and medals, to which the elaborate (and now annotated) index can be a rich and fertile introduction.
In 1704 Evelyn started to write Memories for my Grand-son, Jack being then 22; to this he added a series of ‘Promiscuous Advices’ (Memories, pp. 75–90), adding that it would not be ‘time lost sometime to read over & seriously to consider them’ – such apothegms as ‘He who has a soul to save, a family to provide decently for and a severe accompt [accounting] to give of his actions, needs few diversions to pass away time,’ or ‘Suspect everything that is too prosperous,’ or ‘Too much raillery diminishes respect.’ All those precepts speak to his own character.
In the main memoir, following the example of ‘My Lord Chancellor Bacon’ (p. 40), Evelyn insists upon studying subjects both ‘social, but all practical’; mathematics, in particular, ‘sharpens and settles the judgment’. He urged ‘dexterity of pen’ and the study of ‘the Latin and modern tongues’, especially French and Italian, but not neglecting Spanish and ‘the Saxon’ (German). Keeping commonplace books is encouraged, and maintaining cabinets of both pictures and rarities and ‘natural curiosities’. In particular, he advises on ‘library apartments’, ‘which require your especial and constant inspection, nothing more becoming a person whose education has been something above the ordinary’. Reading lists of both ancient and contemporary authors are supplied, and Evelyn does not ‘restrain him for the translation of others’ works’ (that is, he could undertake translations). A library, not ‘great’ as long it is not ‘contemptible’, is the ‘most desirable furniture and ornament of all’ (since it furnishes the mind and also distinguishes its owner). At one point Evelyn itemizes all the materials that a library should contain and that belong to writing: book presses, ‘standishes’ (ink stands), desks, stamps, scales, binding materials, map cases, penknives, erasers, wax, mathematical and surveying instruments, globes, microscopes, optic glasses and levels. Earlier at Sayes Court he had written instructions for a new gardener; now he has to address personnel at a much larger estate, like a steward with more detailed responsibilities, including the need to review expenditures and wages, seeing that garden and field tools are repaired and oiled, keeping locks on the boat-shed, and making sure that everything from walking sticks, fishing rods and ‘traps against vermin’ are kept in their proper places. And he advises Jack to ‘read Cato, De re rustica, Columella and the Geoponiks’ (that is, agricultural writers).
A fascination with detail colours all of his recommendations; he is nothing if not obsessive on matters from the choice and conduct of a wife, to the raising of children, where Jack is instructed in the rearing of infants to accept ‘precepts, examples, restraints, and encouragements, things useful, delightful and not trifling of the nursery’. Care of Wotton’s woodlands and the conduct of a household and its servants are all carefully explained, and on the issue of ‘recreation’ he recommends ‘gardening, groves and walks and other innocent amenities, so far as to preserve that which is already planted and improvable without suffering it to run to ruin’ (p. 16). Towards the end he lists some of the archives now at Wotton – his writings, ‘several unpolished draughts’ of other books, devotional writings, the unpublished parts of Lucretius, materials pertaining to Margaret Blagge, medical recipes and ‘other books of mechanics’, along with a note that he has annotated ‘with my black-lead crayon’ some hundred authors in his library (p. 68).11
It reads like some résumé of Evelyn’s own life, hopes and relationships. Perhaps it also served as some comfort ‘after so many of my dear children have been taken away & miscarried’ that at least one male Evelyn would continue and cherish the family’s ideals of a fulfilled and useful domestic life. He hopes that Jack will endow six poor people in the parish of Wotton and Abinger (though that did not happen). He began his ‘Advises’ by hoping that Jack will marry or ‘adopt ‘some honorable and worthy person’ in order to perpetuate the name Evelyn (p. 5); but halfway through (p. 69), for he has obviously been drafting his notes randomly, he salutes Jack’s marriage to Anne Boscawen. His last page is dated ‘Ætat.85’.
The care and attention paid now to the future of the Wotton estate, in the hands of an extremely well-instructed Jack, augur how well the Evelyns now felt themselves at home there, despite the earlier inconveniences, the legal concerns and the death of John, who might otherwise have inherited. The family was beginning to enjoy life at Wotton, the gardens were improving, and more of their belongings were moved from Sayes Court; inventories were made of the contents in 1702 – something that implies a commitment to their life there. These are exceptionally detailed, a personal résumé, as it were, of the material aspects of their two lives: a ‘cabinet’ or ‘closet of curiosities’ both literal and metonymic.12 Jack was now married to Anne, niece of Lord Godolphin (as he was by then). And Bohun was appointed to the living of Wotton, though one sermon inveighing against extravagant clothing annoyed Evelyn, who must have felt it was directed at the only two well-dressed women in the family, Susanna and Mary.13 An old man, especially in that period, suffered from a catalogue of illnesses, and Evelyn had excruciating piles, kidney disorders, gout, the stone, and – a hard fate for a gardening man – he broke his shin while walking in Brompton Nursery in March 1703; and he even fell asleep now during sermons. He prayed God to make his infirmities bearable and grant him a peaceful life thereafter. Weather was still an object of worry and an occasion once again for indulging in prognostications. From nearby Albury, William Wotton wrote to him on 22 January 1702 after a particular wretched and destructive storm to cheer him up about how Wotton’s ‘charming groves’ made it such a delicious seat, ‘the greatest ornament of the finest county in England (Correspondence, p. 385). He was alert enough to follow military and political events abroad, including Marlborough’s victory at Blenheim, and seemed to worry about the succession to the throne, for if Queen Anne was to die without issue, George of Hanover would likely assume the throne.
While wintering in London in 1706, John Evelyn died at Dover Street, aged 85, on 27 February, and was buried at Wotton on 4 March. Mary died two years later, at the age of 75, also in February. Jack was awarded a baronetcy in 1713, became a member of both the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries, and also lived into his eighties, dying in 1763.
