Bothwell soon worked his way back into the king’s favour, and exactly a year following his rebellion he was ‘proposed as ambassador… in an attempt to secure the life of his aunt Queen Mary’, though Elizabeth I refused to grant any earl the necessary passport to undertake such a duty. Bothwell’s response to Mary’s death in February 1587 was typically bloody, raiding the English borders for some time until he was granted the revenues of Coldingham Priory, which appeared to cool his fury. Unsurprisingly though, he was caught up in a quarrel again the following year that resulted in the murder of William Stewart in an Edinburgh cellar, a crime for which Bothwell went unpunished.

Bothwell kept himself occupied during the winter of 1588-89 when he had the striking Renaissance-style stonework seen in the above image added to his castle at Crichton, but by April 1589 he was again marching with troops in support of the Brig o’ Dee rebellion – a venture cut short when, on 11 May, James faced down the rebels and soon had Bothwell, along with the earls of Huntly and Crawford, indicted on charges of treason; Bothwell’s fall was characteristically brief, for by the end of the summer he was released from prison together with his co-conspirators.

The roots of Bothwell’s more lasting troubles are found in the events surrounding James’ marriage to Princess Anne of Denmark. Although James was married by proxy to Anne in Copenhagen on 20 August 1589, with the earl of Marischal standing in for the king, it would be months later until the two were joined in person. News first reached the king that ‘the Queine wes in denger upone the seas’ whilst he was staying at Seton House on the coast as he awaited the arrival of his bride. On 22 October James resolved to sail to Norway himself, where Anne was stranded after her fleet’s attempts to reach Scotland were thwarted on three occasions by a combination of severe gales and a series of leaks that sprung on the flagship, Gideon. ‘James was taking events into his own hands,’ write Normand and Roberts, ‘for his present situation was slightly emasculating: he was a husband waiting patiently and safely for his wife, who was risking a dangerous sea crossing to reach him’ (32). His voyage proved far less turbulent than expected, however – he landed on the Norwegian coast on 11 November, and he and Anne were married in Oslo on the 23rd. It was Bothwell who oversaw preparations for the royal couple’s return to Scotland, where they arrived safely on 1 May 1590.

With the king absent from the country for more than half a year, the fifteen-year-old duke of Lennox was made president of the council, assisted by Bothwell. The period during which this interim government ruled over Scotland was remarkably peaceful, but ‘around Lennox and Bothwell there formed a corporeal Stewart faction and once the king returned, this led to greater distrust between the royal cousins.’ These tension erupted when, in January 1591, Bothwell was accused of consulting with witches. The charges were damaging, and on June 22 he was acquainted of the terms for his exile; taking matters into his own hands, the earl escaped his prison the following night, and spent the next few months moving freely about the country in open defiance of the forces pursuing him. He even brazenly invaded the palace at Holyroodhouse in December 1591, making it as far as the bedchamber doors of the King, the Queen, and Chancellor Maitland with a band of sixty men. One account of the incident reads: ‘[Bothwell] and his complices came to the king’s door, and the queen’s, and the chancellor’s; and at one tyme with fire to the king’s doore, and hammers to the queen’s doore.’ The earl is eventually forced to retreat, but the incident proved both alarming and embarrassing to James, who penned a number of sonnets in response to the scare. In one of these, he writes:

How long shall Furies on our fortunes feede
How long shall vice her raigne possesse in rest?
How long shall Harpies our displeasure breede
And monstrous foules sitt sicker in our nest?
In tyme appointed God will suirlie haue
Eache one his due rewarde for to resaue

Contrary to James’ expectations, Elizabeth I began supporting the protestant rebel earl throughout 1593 as she sought to counterbalance the threat of Scottish Catholicism – particularly following the discovery in December 1592 of the so-called Spanish blanks. Despite his new and unexpected influence, Bothwell nevertheless submitted himself personally before James, and there ‘promised to stand trial for treason by witchcraft, and offered the king his own sword and encouraged the monarch to strike off his head if that would satisfy him’. The king declined the offer, and by August 1593 Bothwell was completely cleared of his outlawry. The king’s favour was short-lived however, and on 3 April 1594 royal forces marched out of Edinburgh against the earl, forcing him eventually to retire to northern England; with the king’s position now consolidated, Elizabeth abandoned her earlier support for Bothwell and aligned herself wholeheartedly with James.

Bothwell’s fall from here was swift – in February 1595 the Edinburgh presbytery excommunicated him, and on the following month he set sail on ships pirated for him by his half-brother. Between 1595 and 1600 Bothwell moved around Europe, before he settled in Spain, converted to Catholicism, and acquired several mistresses along the way. His health remained poor however, and he spent much of 1611 receiving treatment in Naples, where he died the following year – ’suspected of necromancy and in abject poverty.’

When Shakespeare was writing Macbeth in the middle of the first decade of the seventeenth century, James had ascended to the English throne and was vying for the unification of England and his native Scotland. Britain’s self-styled ‘Solomon’ had also re-published his tract on witchcraft, Daemonologie, for a London readership upon the year of his ascension in 1603, thus marking out Shakespeare’s ‘Scottish’ play as a particularly pertinent statement. But the above background I have provided points to a much more personal resonance for the King in this tragic tale of regicide and dark sorcery.

The obvious parallel between Macbeth and Bothwell comes in their dealings with witches – explicit in the drama, alleged in the case of the earl. But in each case the consultation is marked by a desire on the behalf of the trusted noble to ascend beyond his rank; the allegations lodged against Bothwell rest on the assumption that he held a claim to the throne in the event of James’ death, and sought information concerning the date of the king’s demise. Unlike Macbeth, he does not act on that information – if he ever had it, or even sought it in the first place – but the threat posed by Bothwell at the height of his powers was palpable, as testified by James’ above sonnet. The threat is amplified by the former closeness of these cousins, a closeness matched in the play by Duncan’s reverence for his victorious “valiant cousin” – though the title does not necessarily signify a familial bond in the play, the implication is significant in the Scottish context.

As already stated, Macbeth does indeed act upon the knowledge granted to him by the witches – he kills the king. Unlike the events at Holyroodhouse in December 1591, Macbeth succeeds in entering the King’s chamber, and there does the deed; the nightmare of James’ Scottish history is played out in bloody detail on the English stage. Bothwell, still roaming the Continent at the time of Macbeth’s first performances, was but a shadow of his former self, but the warning seems to be stark – in the wake of the Gunpowder plot just a year before, the king should never let his guard down, least of all against gentlemen on whom he had built an absolute trust.

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Macpherson, Rob. ‘Stewart, Francis, first earl of Bothwell (1562–1612)’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press, Oct 2006. Web.

Normand, Lawrence, and Gareth Roberts, eds. Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland: James VI’s Demonology and the North Berwick Witches. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000. Print.

Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies. Ed. S. Greenblatt et al. W. W. Norton & Co., 2001. Print.

Mistress Swinnerton then steps up to voice her own evidence, but in the middle of her description of the alleged rape Mosely interrupts her:

[D]id not your Husband come to the Chamber doore at that time you pretended you were Ravisht, and knockt at the Doore, and I would have opened to Doore for him, whereupon your sayd it is my Husband; let the drunken sot stay without, and would not suffer mee to open the Doore

Anne naturally denies Mosely’s claim, and at this point the court returns to her husband by asking what he said to his wife upon entering the room. Master Swinnerton tells the court how he insisted that, “if shee were ravisht as shee sayd shee was” then his wife “must take her Oath of it, and indite him [Mosely] for it”, warning that if she refused this then Master Swinnerton “would believe, that shee had playd the Whore with him, and hee would turne her off, and live no more with her, and shee should be Sir Edward Moselies Whore altogether”.

Master Swinnerton then recounts how he sought out Mosely, and one day chanced upon him in Holborne. After much to-and-fro between them, Swinnerton presses Mosely to accompany him for a cup of ale, and “if he then would give me satisfaction, I would not prosecute the Law against him.” The court intervenes, demanding that Swinnerton clarify what he means by “satisfaction.”

Master Swinnerton answered, onley to know what he could say to excuse himselfe, the Court sayd, why, would you believe him before your Wife? Master Swinnerton answered, my meaning was; if he could satisfie me that my Wife was consenting to it, I had rather wave the prosecution, then bring my Wife and my selfe upon the Stage, and this was my intent and no other

After this, Mosely is asked by the court how Anne’s clothes were torn in the manner earlier described by her husband: “she alwayes went very ill favourdly in her apparrelly”, he replies. There is, however, no suggestion in the account that Mosely was asked to also explain her sprained wrist.

Anne’s maid is then called forth to explain what she saw in her mistress’ chamber immediately after the incident.

[W]hen I came from the Bakers, and entring into the chamber, I found my mistris crying, and wringing her hands, saying she was undone; Also I heard Sir Edward Moseley [sic] say, before I went to the Bakers, that he would lie with my Mistris though he were sure to be hang’d for it, and at all times hee was wont to bee very uncivill and rude when hee came into the Chamber, once hee came into the Chamber when I was there alone, truly I durst not stay in the Chamber, for I alwayes observed, Hee was so lecherously given that any Woman were shee never so meane would serve his turne; At this time he came into the Chamber a little before I went to the Bakers, I observed hee would faine have throwne my Mistris upon the Bed when I was there, but my Mistris would not yeeld to it, but grew very angry with him, and said hee was a rogue, and spit in his face, yet hee would not let her alone, whereupon I told him, if hee would not be more civill, I would call my Master, and if hee came hee would crack his crowne for using my Mistriss so uncivilly, Sir Edward Mosely answered he cared not a fart for my Master, and that for mee I was a base Jade, and hee would make mee kisse his, &c. what said the Court, but the Maid having some modesty could not bring it out, then said her Mistris, he said she should kisse something that was about him, what was that said the Court againe, Master Swinnerton answered, he said he would make her kisse his Arse, then the Court said to the Maide, you must not be so nice in speaking of the truth, being upon your Oath

Anne then alleges that she was offered a hundred pounds to keep quiet, but asserts that only if Mosely “would downe upon his knees and confesse that he had wronged me, I would not prosecute him”, further demanding that he wear a paper upon his breast or hat “acknowledging the injury hee had done unto mee.”

Mosely calls upon his own witness – a Master Kilvert – who recounts how he once overheard Anne Swinnerton bragging about how, on a previous occasion, she had “received three hundred pounds for the composition of a Rape, which shee charged a Reverend Divine withall.” Despite seeming coy about giving the name at first, Kilvert reveals the wronged man as a Doctor Belanquell, who, conveniently, is “long since dead, and in Heaven.” Kilvert claims that Anne desired “two thousand pounds for a composition of Sir Edward Moseley”, and upon hearing this Anne cries out that Kilvert “was a Knave, and a Rascall, and all was flase which he said.” She does, however, confess to being present at the tavern where Kilvert claimed she made these statements – “but”, it is added, “this Rascall Kilvert had bewitcht her to come tither.” Kilvert concludes his evidence by recounting how, whilst in the tavern, Anne sat next to Mosely: “and there falls hugging and imbracing him; whereupon said hee, surely Lady whereas you say Sir Edward hath ravisht you, I doe believe rather you have ravisht him, otherwise you would not make so much of him.”

Another witness notes how “after I had seriously look’t upon her, and seeing of her a woman of that strength and body, I said, I wondred Sir Edward Moseley should ravish her: She said, do you wonder at that, why? doe you take me behinde the Bed there (there being a Bed in the Roome) and see whether you may doe it.” Further witnesses continue to paint a similar picture of the lady, together with further expressions of disbelief that Sir Edward was physically capable of raping her at all (one witness wonders “how Sir Edward being but a little Man and shee such a lusty Woman should be ravisht by him!”). Unsurprisingly, Mosely is found not guilty, but warned: “take heede what company you keepe hereafter.”

Michael Mendle has written that exchanges such as these “made the possibilities of the medium only too obvious.” He notes also that the reporter and his printer “had a few problems” by not using play typography, though I would argue that the very absence of this typography (witness names marked clearly in italics etc.) stresses the need for it in an account that is, even with my summaries here, difficult at times to follow – it can take a moment to figure out who is speaking, and when they are speaking it.

Despite this confusion, the very content of the report hints at the theatrical nature of these events. Swinnerton himself invokes stage imagery when he asserts that he would prefer not to perform before the court (and, possibly, its wider audience made possible via the reporter’s account of it). Even the maid’s narrative transpires like some comic interlude amidst the tragedy of Anne Swinnerton’s dishonour. One wonders, in fact, to what extent the players in this courtroom drama were deliberately performing roles in the presence of a reporter whose account could potentially broadcast their words to a wider audience capable of their own extra-judicial judgement.

It’s likely that the performative energies of the court were in place long before 1647, but with the theatres already closed for half a decade and reporters and stenographers now a common presence at court, those energies were greatly amplified. Even where little doubt remained concerning certain cases, a strong performance could nevertheless turn the accused into a martyr. Archbishop Laud’s demise was arguably celebrated more than it was mourned in England, but in a telling exchange with the stenographer present at his execution he clearly acknowledges the power of this medium to influence a public arena increasingly aware of its own importance:

Then turning to Master Hinde, [Laud] said, Friend, I beseech you hear me, I cannot say I have spoken every word as it is in my Paper, but I have gone very neer it, to help my memory as well as I could; but I beseech you, let me have no wrong done to me.

Hinde. Sir youshall [sic] not, if I doe any wrong let it fall on my own head. I pray God have mercy on your soul.

Cant. I thank you: I did not speak with any jealousie, as if you would so do, but I spake it onely as a poor man, goeing out of the world, it is not possible for me to keep to the words in my paper; and a phrase may do me wrong. [emphasis mine]

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Mendle, Michael. “News and the pamphlet culture of mid-seventeenth-century England.” The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe. London, England: Routledge, 2001. 57-79. Print.

Wiseman, Susan. Drama and Politics in the English Civil War. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Print.

Despite the prominence of (post)colonialist readings of The Tempest throughout the second half of the twentieth century, two of its most memorable cinematic treatments during that same period eschewed such interpretations. Forbidden Planet relocates the action to the planet Altair IV and re-imagines the original’s usurped Milanese duke as an empowered twenty-third century engineer, whilst Peter Greenaway’s more avant-garde Prospero’s Books draws upon advances in modern digital technology to imbue its authentic Renaissance setting with the director’s characteristic richness. Real and imagined technologies are thus employed to usher Shakespeare’s last solo play into the electronic age, eliciting pertinent questions about the fate of the codex in our e-book culture together with reflections upon the impact of emergent technologies on early modern playwriting.

The first decade of the twenty-first century has given rise to a new wave of scholarly thought seeking to answer such questions, ranging from Adam Max Cohen’s study into how key Shakespearean metaphors presumed a familiarity with diverse technological developments, to Henry Turner’s more recent suggestion that A Midsummer Night’s Dream demonstrates an awareness of the stage as a machine projecting artificial life. I aim to further these discussions by analysing Prospero’s art in relation to the writing of Sir Francis Bacon. What insights does a close reading of New Atlantis – particularly in its representation of a technocratic hierarchy presiding over a lost island – shed on Shakespeare’s attitude to the formation of new cultural identities during the first information revolution? And in a play owing so much to Christopher Marlowe’s Faustian caution against the ravishing grip of insatiable hunger for (forbidden) knowledge, how does Shakespeare’s similarly bookish protagonist legitimise his own occult science? Reacting against the critical emphasis on Turning Turk in the Renaissance, I will examine how and why Shakespeare’s stranded souls were Turning Tech in The Tempest.

It was only very recently that I discovered the tendency among non-traditionalists (it feels mean to opt for ‘conspiracy theorists’) to cite The Tempest’s allusions to William Strachey’s True Reportory as evidence for a Baconian origin to all of the plays commonly attributed to William Shakespeare of Stratford-Upon-Avon. It’s easy to stray into this quagmire when discussing the role Bacon’s writings play in Shakespeare’s dramas, particularly when one argues for a technologising element to his last that anticipates much of what would emerge in the then-Solicitor General’s prose fiction. But the parallels with New Atlantis really are quite intriguing, and although it’s encouraging to see that studies are beginning to emerge on this (see Mickael Popelard’s piece “Spectacular Science: A Comparison of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Bacon’s New Atlantis” in The Spectacular in and Around Shakespeare), it needs to be placed in the wider context of knowledge dissemination during the first half of the seventeenth century – the aim of my thesis.

Something not addressed in the above proposal but which has been on my mind recently is the role of Caliban in the play. It’s true that Prospero’s “thing of darkness” has been subjected (quite rightly) to a great deal of critical attention from the post-colonialist camp in recent decades, but what if there’s more to him than merely the uneasy semblance of a dispossessed native? What if instead the writers behind Forbidden Planet had metamorphosed not Ariel but Caliban into a machine? This is perhaps a leap of the imagination for cultures long accustomed to Moorish or zoomorphic portrayals of the latter, as the print to the left makes clear by presenting Caliban as an amalgamation of the two. Nevertheless, if we resist the lure of anachronism we can begin to understand how and why Shakespeare imbued his magical island with vestiges of early modern technology.

The title of my proposal sets to clearly establish this, for Prospero’s ‘art’ is itself a kind of technology – as Nick Poyntz has reminded us elsewhere, “the word ‘τέχνη’ from which it derives means craft or art”; but the usurped duke isn’t the only presence on the island capable of learning a craft, as Caliban is capable of much else besides the functions by which his master defines him prior to his entry in I.ii. Miranda’s grudging parenthetical concession makes this clear later on in that scene:

Abhorred slave,
Which any print of goodness wilt not take,
Being capable of all ill; I pitied thee,
Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour
One thing or other. When thou didst not, savage,
Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like
A thing most brutish, I endow’d thy purposes
With words that made them known. But thy vile race
(Though thou didst learn) had that in’t which good natures
Could not abide to be with

I.ii.352-61 [emphasis mine]

I would suggest that there are subtle hints of classroom rivalry here – Miranda is almost astonished that the gabbling Caliban could learn, burying her recognition of his intellectual capacity beneath assaults of outraged moralism. She dismisses his language as “gabble” in an effort to disguise her communicative disadvantage in his presence, and teaches him her “words” to better her own understanding (and thus, perhaps, to exert some control over him) despite her claims to the contrary.

Defined by functions of physicality, empowered by a remarkable ability to process and – as his curses show – re-appropriate information, and lacking basic distinctions between right and wrong, Caliban is perhaps seen to be a variation on modern cyberpunk villains or marauding machines from numerous Hollywood science fiction flicks to us, but to early modern audiences there was also a technology at hand whose status was still ambiguous to many areas of society: the printing press. The comparison finds its roots in the comment which prompts Miranda’s outburst – Caliban reveals that, had his master not intervened, he would have gladly raped the girl to people the island with his brood, and the would-be victim immediately rebukes him by claiming that “any print of goodness wilt not take” him. The image likens Caliban to sheets of paper against which certain inked types (those of “goodness”) are resistant, and the metaphor is strengthened when we recall that the sexual pun on “press” was current in early modern society and capitalised in The Merry Wives of Windsor II.i when Mrs. Page (a suggestive title in itself) complains that Falstaff “cares not what he puts into the press when he would put us two”. Is Miranda perhaps offering herself as just one such “print of goodness” who “wilt not take” the “ill” of Caliban?

Despite his capacity to absorb so much knowledge as to induce envy among his detainers, Caliban finds that he cannot press himself into incompatible virtuous types. Instead, his failure reduces him to text-less parchment, or a book without an author. But maybe in the end he finally gains one – “this thing of darkness”, Prospero resignedly admits, “I acknowledge mine.”

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Cohen, Adam Max. Shakespeare and Technology: Dramatizing Early Modern Technological Revolutions. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Print.

Popelard, Mickael. “Spectacular Science: A Comparison of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Bacon’s New Atlantis.” The Spectacular in and Around Shakespeare. Ed. Pascale Drouet. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. 17-40. Print.

Poyntz, Nick. “Information technology and early modern readers.” Mercurius Politicus. Web. 30 Nov 2008.

Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Ed. Alden T. Vaughan & Virginia Mason Vaughan. Arden Shakespeare, 1999. Print.

Turner, Henry S. “Life Science: Rude Mechanicals, Human Mortals, Posthuman Shakespeare.” South Central Review 26.1-2 (2009): 197-217. CrossRef. Web.

Forbidden Planet. Dir. Fred M. Wilcox. Perf. Walter Pidgeon, Anne Francis, Leslie Nielsen, Warren Stevens. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), 1956. Film.

Prospero’s Books. Dir. Peter Greenaway. Perf. John Gielgud, Michael Clark, Isabelle Pasco, Mark Rylance. Cine Electra Ltd, 1991. Film.

Observant readers may have noticed a small change to the look of my blog, but you’d need to scroll to the bottom of the page to see it. Like Sample did years ago, I’ve placed a Creative Commons licence in the page’s footer to make a statement about the material I publish in this blog (and, possibly, on other pages I may add to the site in future): you can share it as long as you attribute it to me, don’t make any money from it, and don’t change it. Of course you could have shared my content before, and even now I’m hardly going to sue you if you don’t credit me when you’re quoting from my blog, but that’s beside the point. The fact is, I agree with Sample’s assessment that it’s important for academics to declare publicly that, when possible, their work is available to share with others (under certain, limited preconditions).

Before taking on board Sample’s insights, I’d already started to make my research more transparent by sharing my Zotero library, and linking to its most recent additions in the sidebar accompanying my blog. I’m also in the process of adding my notes on the sources I’ve read into Zotero so that they too will be available to anyone who cares to read them. I’ve already been contacted by a cohort here at Exeter who found me through Zotero – a positive thing not only because a PhD can be a solitary experience and any aids to social networking help to reduce isolationist tendencies, but also because mutual research transparency helps to hasten the discovery of missing links in a project that might otherwise take weeks of skimming frustratedly through bibliographies to find.

Sample’s observation that academics are overly-protective of their work-in-progress is right on the money. His blog (and I hope mine too) is a testament to why the research process can be enriched if it is opened up to audiences outside of the conference circuit. It doesn’t matter that my own blog sees few comments, because obscure but cogent academic bloggers can and often do find thoughtful audiences willing to participate in the conversation – not that I’d claim any degree of insight worthy of great attention myself at this stage, but I’m stubborn enough to keep trying.

As a footnote to my reflections on this matter (remember – blog to reflect, Twitter to connect), I’d like to share with you the digital tools I find most useful in my research. I’ve ordered them with my most-frequently used tool at the top, but you can probably guess what that is already. Note that the majority of these tools require Firefox to work.

• Zotero

Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do your work – in the web browser itself.

• Read It Later

A Firefox extension that allows you to save pages of interest to read later. It eliminates cluttering of bookmarks with sites that are merely of a one-time interest.

• TweetDeck

It’s difficult to overstate the significance of Twitter to my research. TweetDeck is a personal browser for connecting with contacts across Twitter, and enables immediate URL-shortening. It came with the ability to organise contacts via lists long before Twitter implemented the feature itself.

• start.io

A startpage to hold all of your favorite links. Unlike RSS readers (such a Google Reader, which is also worth a mention) that keep spitting content whether you’re caught up or not, start.io allows you to interact with that content on your own time, without the hassle of swimming through long streams of text – it notifies you of new content without displaying the content itself. It does have its pitfalls however, and this is where traditional RSS readers do have their place. Start.io has been my home page for months now, and that’s not likely to change anytime soon.

• Hyperwords

A Firefox add-on turning every highlighted word into a hyperlink. I use this for quick-referencing Wikipedia articles, Wiktionary definitions, and instant search results in Amazon and elsewhere for books unavailable in my University library.

• LeechBlock

A simple productivity tool designed to block those time-wasting sites that can suck the life out of your working day. All you need to do is specify which sites to block and when to block them – essential for chronic procrastinators.

• bubbl.us

A simple and free web application for brainstorming online. Mindmaps can be printed and/or exported as image files, and unlike most mindmapping software it’s incredibly fun to use.

• Aardvark

Powerful and user-friendly selector utility for cleaning up web pages prior to printing them – useful for saving ink and paper, and for isolating the content you actually want to read.

Tradescant went on a horticultural shopping spree, eventually shipping home nearly 1,000 specimens, including roses, currants, vines, and numerous fruit trees. Many of the specimens with which Tradescant stocked Hatfield’s gardens had not previously been seen in England, and when he visited Hatfield three decades later, John Evelyn declared that “the most considerable rarity besides the House… was the Garden & Vineyard rarely well water’d and planted.

Swann, 30

It was in 1615, three years after the first earl’s death, that Tradescant switched his allegiance to Edward, Lord Wotton, residing at the former monastery of St. Augustine at Canterbury. There survives at the Bodleian Library among the Ashmole manuscripts Tradescant’s diary documenting his ‘Viag of Ambusad’ via the North Cape to Archangel whilst accompanying an embassy to Tsar Michael Feodorovich, undertaken during his time of employment under Wotton. As on the occasion of his previous trip abroad, Tradescant shipped numerous specimens back home, and conducted the first investigations on Russian soil of coastal flora. Such success brought the gardener’s craft to the attention of George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham, into whose service Tradescant entered in 1623, again visiting France when his new retainer was sent there to escort Henrietta Maria back to England in 1625. This time, in addition to his customary role as the purchaser of rare trees and other plants, Tradescant also oversaw Buckingham’s acquisition of other rarities for his curiosity cabinet; through such efforts, Tradescant developed a network of contacts and started to build a collection of rarities himself – moving them into his house in Lambeth in Surrey following Buckingham’s assassination in 1628.

John Wykeham Archer’s garden-view drawing of the house at Lambeth, dated October 1858 (AN679134001; © The Trustees of the British Museum)

Prior to Tradescant’s death in 1638, he was appointed “Keeper of His Majesty’s Gardens, Vines, and Silkwormes” at Oaklands Palace. His final position as custodian of the Oxford Physic Garden capped a career in professional horticulture, but his involvement at Oxford was short-lived – he took up his post there a year before his death. Tradescant’s career demonstrates how a subordinate operating within an aristocratic system used his elite associations to obtain rarities that eventually formed a collection to rival that of his social superiors’; furthermore, Tradescant and his son, also called John (and into whose care the collection passed), “commodified the experience of viewing their collection; anyone could see the Tradescant’s rarities upon payment of an entrance fee… [thus subverting] the elite paradigm of collecting and viewing collections as status markers” (Swann, 37).

Elias Ashmole perpetuated at least some aspect of this approach when he granted universal access to this collection after he donated it to Oxford University in 1683, but went a step further by scrapping the admission fee altogether. Such charitable gestures mask a troubling process of acquisition by which the collection came into his possession, however. Ashmole, the son of a Litchfield saddler, began practising law in 1638 at the age of twenty one, after reaching London through accompanying the sons of James Pagit, a baron of the exchequer and a distant relative of Elias’ mother. Later that year he married the genteel but impoverished Eleanor, and following her death in 1641 Ashmole, ever the keen astrologer, was elated when a horoscope told him that he would “‘labour for a fortune with a wife and get it’”, a prophecy he fulfilled by marrying Mary, Lady Mainwaring, in 1649 (Swann, 42). Though thrice widowed and twenty years his senior, Lady Mainwaring provided the aspiring lawyer, astrologer and alchemist with a steady income which allowed him “to be enabled to live to my selfe & Studies, without being forced to take paines for a livelyhood in the World” (Josten, 1.47). Ashmole’s new-found wealth also made it possible for him to amass a collection of books, scientific instruments and coins, and it was around this time that he first visited the Tradescant “Ark” at Lambeth.

According to the younger Tradescant, it was in part due to the behest of his friends that, among other things, “the enumeration of these Rarities… would be an honour to our Nation” which persuaded him to compile a catalogue of his collection; in 1652 he embarked on this effort with the help of “two worthy friends” – the physician Dr Thomas Wharton, and his “most beloved friend” Elias Ashmole. Despite some delays caused by the death of Tradescant the younger’s son (also called John), the Musaeum Tradescantianum was published in 1656 under Tradescant’ name, though financed by Ashmole and often attributed solely to him. According to Hester Tradescant, John the younger’s wife, the deed of gift signed in December 1659 giving the entire collection as catalogued in the Musaeum to Ashmole after both John Tradescant and his wife had died was first produced by four strangers who accompanied her inebriated husband home one night; realising what he’d done the next morning, Tradescant cut the seal off the deed and obliterated the signatures, bequeathing the Ark’s contents to his wife in his final will drawn up two years later.

John Tradescant the younger died in April 1662, and less than a month later Elias Ashmole preferred a Bill of Complaint in Chancery against Hester, who disputed the lawyer’s claim to her late husband’s treasures. The suit was heard in 1664 and adjudicated in Ashmole’s favour, reiterating his claim that the collection was granted to him in recognition of his efforts in compiling the catalogue. Although the Ark was entrusted to Hester until the time of her death, a commission was set up to check the condition of its items against their representation in the Musaeum Tradescantianum; William Dugdale, one of the two men who sat on this commission, married his daughter Elizabeth to Ashmole in 1668, seven months after the death of Lady Mainwaring.

Despite losing her legal battle against Ashmole, Hester Tradescant continued to add to her husband’s collection, as always displaying it at the family home in South Lambeth. By October of 1674, however, she found herself living right next door to the man who had triumphed over her at Chancery a decade earlier – Elias Ashmole moved into the property adjoining the Ark with his third wife. Within weeks of moving in, Ashmole carried off some of Tradescant’s rarities to his house, and before the end of the year Hester, Ashmole claimed, “forced” him to take away further rarities, and she even “voluntarily helped to remove some of them [her] selfe”. Although still not legally recognised as the owner of the treasures now housed under his roof, Ashmole nevertheless limited access to the collection only to the likes of Robert Hooke and John Evelyn, and by 1675 – with Hester still alive and legally the owner of the entire collection – Ashmole “was negotiating with officials at the University of Oxford, specifying that if he were to donate the rarities to the University, they should be housed in a new, purpose-built ‘large Rooem’” (Swann, 49). Determined to safeguard his new identity both as the owner and donator of the rehoused Ark, Ashmole forced Hester to sign a Submission in the presence of a Justice and seven other witnesses that recanted several accusations she had previously made against the lawyer, and also disavowed the claim that she had made him swear to bestow the collection to Oxford; Ashmole would not have anyone believe that his decision to donate “his” collection was influenced by anything other than his own good will.

In April 1678 Hester Tradescant was found drown in her own garden pond, and less than a year later Ashmole obtained the lease on her house and gardens. Work shortly began on the building that would house his now legally-acquired collection, consisting of a basement laboratory and a ground-floor lecture theatre, with the collection itself displayed on the upper floor. The Musaeum Ashmoleanum (as it was known) was so costly to build that the Bodleian was allegedly unable to purchase any books for some years after its completion, and when it was finally completed in 1683 Oxford had spent more than £4,500 on Ashmole’s Ark; in addition, during construction it was deemed necessary to demolish part of a wall that housed in its niches a number of statues collected by the Earl of Arundel. “[I]n this instance”, writes Marjorie Swann, “Ashmole’s collection was responsible for the effacement of remnants of elite Stuart collecting practices” (52).

On 26 January 1679, a fire ripped through Middle Temple and destroyed Ashmole’s chambers; in the fire he lost his collection of over 9,000 coins and medals, together with many printed books and volumes of notes. Although it is tempting to accuse Ashmole of claiming an undeserved degree of ownership over the Tradescant collection by wiping virtually all memory of its originators when he donated the lot to Oxford, it is worth remembering that when he did so in 1683 he was compelled to draw from Tradescant’s collection far more than he had intended. Some time after the museum opened, the lawyer repaired this loss by donating over a thousand coins from a collection of his not destroyed in the fire at Middle Temple, as well as a huge accumulation of books and manuscripts and many other items. The man’s cunning throughout the seventeenth century seems remarkable to us even today, and his behaviour towards Hester Tradescant is striking for its single-minded pursuit of what little she had left to remember her husband and father-in-law by, but as we walk through the doors of the Ashmolean Museum today we must not forget that without Elias Ashmole the Ark left to us would have arguably lacked many of its rich treasures we’re free to explore in the twenty-first century.

At St. Mary’s Church in Lambeth, Ashmole’s epitaph reads:

He passed away on 18 May 1692, at the age of 76, but as long as the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford endures, he will never die

Portrait of Elias Ashmole, as a bust on a socle set into a niche; the final state, dated 1656 (AN119809001; © The Trustees of the British Museum)

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Hunter, Michael. “Oxford DNB article: Ashmole, Elias.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2004. Print.

Josten, C. H., ed. Elias Ashmole (1617–1692). His Autobiographical and Historical Notes, his Correspondence, and Other Contemporary Sources Relating to his Life and Work. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966. Print.

MacGregor, Arthur. “Tradescant, John, the elder (d. 1638).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2004. Print.

Swann, Marjorie. Curiosities and Texts: The Culture of Collecting in Early Modern England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. Print.