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)

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.