by Mac Griswold
A dot marks the center of the Brinleys’ large garden behind the house complex fronting on St. John’s Lane. Ogilby and Morgan’s 1676 London map was the first accurate and detailed map of the city, with all the buildings represented in the plan.
The back of the Brinley house faced west, catching the last rays of the setting sun, a boon when candles were a luxury and Little Ice Age winters were frigid. Elizabethan domestic architecture had glorified glass as a stylish and expensive building material, opening windows into tall banks of light. (Cavendish’s grandmother, the redoubtable Elizabeth Hardwick, had built the Glass House of her day: “Hardwick Hall, more glass than wall.”) It’s likely the Brinleys had at least one large window at the rear of the second floor, the typical location for a “long room,” or gallery, from which the entire garden panorama could be admired at a glance.
“The Best and Surest Herbe”
The size of the Brinley garden behind the house may have come as a surprise to visitors: the same 1676 map reveals that the space was as large as that of the Berkeleys’ garden, maybe even a bit larger. Other nearby houses are depicted on the map with orchards and knot gardens laid out in patterns, probably of cut turf and gravel, but these two areas are shown as simple rectangles. Paradoxically, what begins to make Grizzell’s London life come alive for me as a landscape historian are the two straight lines that quarter the plot, dividing the long space into four equal parterres, an ancient and handsome design appropriate for a court official such as Thomas Brinley. Tubbed topiary trees (cypress, bay, or juniper) would have punctuated the corners of the plats. Glistening boxwood—that evergreen shrub so revered in later centuries at Sylvester Manor—would have been set as hedging or edging.
Britons had known boxwood for centuries before Grizzell’s time. Man-sized ancient Buxus sempervirens specimens still grow wild in Surrey, skinny druids on the chalky slopes of Box Hill above the North Downs. Geoffrey Chaucer, appointed a royal forester in the 1390s, mentions box as a common woodland tree. Clipped specimens flanked a London doorway in 1490, and low hedges rimmed garden beds as early as 1500.
Tall-growing boxwood, Buxus sempervirens, is known as “standard” or “tree” box and was for long the only species the English knew. The giants at Sylvester Manor are standard box. The slower-growing “dwarf” or edging strains of box, Buxus sempervirens L. var. suffruticosa, are denser, shorter, and have smaller leaves. They were either hybridized or discovered as “sports,” or natural mutations, by French and Dutch horticulturists shortly before English gardeners began to import the plant in the first quarter of the seventeenth century for royal and upper-class gardens. In 1629, John Parkinson, botanist to King Charles I, wrote about “French or Dutch Boxe” he had seen in the gardens of plant collectors. He condemned its “unpleasing sent which many mislike,” an aroma some say reeks of cat piss and others savor as the bitter fragrance of history. (Scientists have at last identified the source of the smell, a volatile organic compound containing sulfur, also present in Sauvignon Blanc!) Parkinson nonetheless wholeheartedly recommended it for edging beds as “the best and surest herbe to abide faire and green in all the bitter storms of the sharpest Winter and all the great heates and droughts of Summer.” Thomas Brinley would have seen an abundance of it in the royal palaces where he served, and Grizzell could not have stepped out of her garden door in Clerkenwell without brushing against boxwood of some kind, a furry little green creature, a household companion. Not that this necessarily means she carried a rooted cutting with her from England, as Cornelia Horsford, the early twentieth-century chatelaine of the manor and its gigantic boxwoods, would have it. Boxwood, alone among the plants that early colonists brought with them to America, has no discernible medicinal or culinary value. So why would Grizzell have carried it with her? Familiarity, or homesickness—and status value—are reasons that spring to a speculative historian’s mind.
Grizzell was a woman who saved what she could from the past and looked to the future. Years later, on Shelter Island, she bequeathed a precious teething toy she surely had brought from England, “the Child’s Corall w. ch. hath silver bells on it,” to “the first son of any of my Sons, who bears his grandfathers name,” meaning her husband, Nathaniel, whose name she wanted remembered by future generations. But in truth, if the ancestors of the boxwoods now growing at the manor’s garden gate reached the island at that early date, they might as easily have traveled from the Netherlands with Nathaniel, an arriviste eager to advertise his gentility and, as a merchant with ships, well placed to order direct.
In the Brinley garden, seeds of garden favorites such as primroses, opium poppies, and violets were found in one archaeological deposit, along with those of the ghostly gray wild fumitory, which creeps along the ground like smoke. Well-rotted manure enriched every inch of planting space. All paths would have been graveled for drainage in London’s wet weather, and to ensure dry footing for the pleasure of “walking up and downe, and about the garden.” Brisk walks were also thought to expel unwholesome humors from lungs and head. In troubled times to come during the Civil War, Thomas could stroll in his garden “for the delight and comfort of his wearied mind.” Just closing the door on the noisome street outside to be welcomed by the fragrance and order within would have cheered anyone in seventeenth-century London.
Divinely Ordered
From late spring into early summer, the greatest floral flourish in gardens such as the Brinleys’ was a cumulus cloud of fruit blossom, promising sweetness. Sugar was precious and fresh fruit seasonal. Lawson advised that the roots of fruit trees be “powdered with strawberries, Red, White and Green,” and beds planted with berry bushes “hanging and dropping with … Raspberries, Barberries, Currans.” Familiar fruits—apples, cherries, pears, peaches, and plums—as well as mulberries, figs, medlars, and sloes, which are exotic eating today—were trained in pots or to grow as regular patterns of branches that were pruned for maximum fruiting and espaliered against rosy brick walls. This orchard spoke to the satisfying human control over nature ordained by God since the Garden of Eden. Rank and class pervaded the seventeenth-century natural world in a hierarchy that descended from the regal rose to lowly weeds. John Parkinson advised gardeners to lay out their plots “as may be fit and answerable to the degree they hold [in society],” like sumptuary laws for the garden.
When Grizzell was born, five of her brothers and sisters were under ten years old; Anne no doubt assigned her children tasks like pulling carrots, picking fresh “sallet” greens, or finding and squishing cabbage worms. In the Brinleys’ square brick-lined cesspit, archaeologists have found the remains of Leprisinus varius, a beetle that lives in ash trees. The Hollar view of St. John’s Gate shows a row of small trees standing on the far side of the wall that abuts the gate tower; beyond rise the rounded crowns of larger trees—perhaps ash?—obscuring all but the gables of Berkeley House. Bees did the work of pollination, traveling in and out of their “warm and dry Bee-house, comely made of Fir-boards.” “Bird pots,” home to martins, swifts, and starlings, hung from trees or were attached to house walls. They supplied the kitchen with eggs and nestlings: “Four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie” is not just a nursery rhyme.
William Lawson, author of A New Orchard and Garden and its companion, The Countrie House-Wife’s Garden (issued ten times between 1617 and 1683), wrote, “The skill and Paines of Weeding the garden with weeding knives or fingers, I refer to herselfe, and her maides, willing them to take the opportunity after a showre of raine; with all I advise the Mistresse, either to be present herselfe or to teach her maides to know hearbes from weedes.” The mistress of the Brinley house and garden, of course, was Anne Wase Brinley. Anne may not have done much gardening herself, but she was expected to know the work well enough to direct it. Gentry like the Brinleys hired “weeder women” (Lawson’s “maides”) in addition to professional gardeners. Women of every class were familiar with the garden as both larder and medicine chest. Even ornamental flowers had useful pro
perties to recommend them; Lawson praised clove pinks for “comforting the spirits, by the sense of smelling.”
Archaeologists also identified a compost pit by the seeds it contained. Macrofossils of garden plants are hard to identify, as the seeds of wild plants are almost indistinguishable from those of closely related cultivars, but when verifiable seeds of stinking chamomile, black bindweed, and other common weeds turn up together in a single deposit, it means someone was weeding.
Service, Servitude, and Slavery
The Brinleys’ status as “metropolitan gentry” meant that they employed a number of servants. Live-in domestics, they were usually young, ranging from children of ten or twelve to adults. Indeed, most young people in seventeenth-century England were servants or apprentices of one kind or another, learning skills and saving wages while receiving room and board. Even the gentry and aristocracy sent their sons to “serve” in other families of similar or higher rank. “The institution of servants and apprentices helped solve the problem of what to do with children between puberty and marriage,” as the historical anthropologist Alan Macfarlane has written. Like the words “service” and “servant” (Thomas Brinley was “the king’s servant”), “family” was defined more broadly in the seventeenth century than it is today. The English term comes from the Latin famuli, meaning “slaves living under one roof who make up the familia,” or a man’s “whole property, both real and personal, houses, lands, money, cattle, slaves, etc.” Both the tradition of service as an honorable but temporary condition of life shared by thousands, and the ancient concept of family as familia, or whole property, including slaves, would travel to America.
Grizzell Brinley’s comfortable childhood seems as remote from the Africa of the Middle Passage as it does from Shelter Island. However, black domestics were not unknown in London in the 1640s. An alderman employed “three blackamore maids”; a brewer gave his black servant, Frauncis, a decent burial in the Aldgate parish graveyard. At the court of Elizabeth I, aristocrats had employed black personal attendants outfitted in fantastic garb, like the queen’s “lytle Blackamore” dressed in “white Taffeta, cut and lined with tincel, striped down with gold and silver.”
The number of “Indeans, Moores, Moreans, Neygers” and mulattos living in England from as early as the Tudor period testified to the expansion of travel, trade, and imperial exploration. Slavery was made officially but ineffectively illegal within England in 1569: the law was generally construed only to limit the savagery with which slaves could be treated, not the question of ownership, so people of color inhabited an uneasy up-and-down world in which they could still be bought or sold. Queen Elizabeth had twice ordered “blackamoors” out of England, claiming they took English jobs, while others were treated as figures of fun, as if they were jesters and dwarves, and a few, like Captain Pedro Negro, “a Spaniard,” received honors for secrets they passed along from foreign enemies; still others were simply rated as domestic property.
For an image of a black person treated matter-of-factly as chattel, Grizzell needed look no farther than her own parish church. St. James Clerkenwell housed “a costly stone altar-tomb, with Corinthian pillars, to the memory of Lady Elizabeth Berkeley, one of Queen Elizabeth’s Ladies of the Bedchamber, whose effigy lay in state with the head of a negro at her feet.” A variation on the carved dogs that had faithfully attended generations of tomb figures as footrests, this grotesque head was already apparently part of the everyday order of things. So from childhood onward, Grizzell may have been no stranger to black faces and the concept of African servitude.
The Ascent of the Auditor
Between 1626 and 1641, Grizzell’s father occupied a solid pew in the Anglican establishment and a lofty desk at the Royal Exchequer. A descendant of minor Staffordshire gentry, he had benefited from his marriage into a family with strong civil service connections. He clerked for his wife’s great-uncle, Richard Budd, one of the seven auditors who supervised all crown accounts, before becoming one himself. Land and property made up much of the crown’s great wealth, but Tudor and Stuart monarchs were constantly short of cash. The auditors’ primary job had been to visit the king’s estates to assess and collect rents, but increasingly they were also required to value the crown lands, make contact with buyers, and negotiate sales to boost the royal coffers. They became real estate agents, collecting commissions and, as opportunities arose, buying properties and making deals for themselves.
Thomas reached the peak of his career in 1636, when in the course of his duties he and Charles Harbord, the royal surveyor general, and other partners received a royal grant as part of the king’s negotiations with Sir Cornelius Vermuyden, a Dutch embankment engineer, to drain some eighteen square miles of fenland in Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire, and Lincolnshire. The profits of a total of 12,459 acres of crown lands, including all existing “houses, buildings, stables, dovecots, [and] gardens,” were to be divided among six lucky men “and their heirs and assigns.” Had the war not intervened, even a fractional share of that acreage would have given Thomas, as a prominent landowner, the opportunity to gain a knighthood, and perhaps more, through skillful political maneuvering and illustrious alliances for his children.
The Air Grizzell Breathed: Spectacle, Science, and Magic
In his role as a royal servant, Thomas Brinley observed the king’s splendors—or, as his auditor, at least could estimate what they cost. As a child, Grizzell would have heard from him about glamorous masques at Whitehall, Charles I’s favorite palace, in which even the king and queen danced and sang, conjuring up a mythic microcosm where a beneficent monarch ruled over amicable subjects. The ideal world onstage melted into the real. In Aurelian Townshend’s Albion’s Triumph, the stage set morphed from a scene of the ancient Roman republic into a shimmering “prospect of the King’s palace of Whitehall and part of the city of London.”
Meanwhile, a different sort of drama began to take place in gardens. The Renaissance discovery of classical antiquity and fresh ideas of perspective and symmetry arriving from the Continent transformed English landscapes into theaters. The lead roles went to exotic flora that proclaimed England’s prowess in global exploration, trade, and colonization. Gardeners, scientists, scholars, and collectors drawn to natural rarities and oddities were esteemed as “the curious.”
As part of the new and passionate intellectual interest in science and natural history, the British began to shape what became known as “natural philosophy,” a new way for “the curious” to connect with their surroundings. Natural philosophy’s atmosphere of free inquiry and intellectual independence was first advanced by Sir Francis Bacon at the beginning of the seventeenth century and was fostered by empirical scientists such as Robert Boyle, one of the first proponents of a mechanical universe.
Boyle and his fellows—the Connecticut alchemist Governor John Winthrop Jr. among them—held that only rigorous and repeated experimentation, accompanied by skepticism, could deliver the truths of nature. Alchemy, now popularly marginalized as an occult search to transmute base metals into gold, in fact sought to refine material to its elemental forms using basic laboratory techniques, a perfectly scientific aspiration. At the same time, as the colonial historian Walter Woodward writes, “a world of wonders is almost by definition a world of magical possibilities.” Leading thinkers, confident that “all parts of nature—minerals, plants, stars, animals, humans—were alive and correspondent with each other,” easily reconciled a magical cosmic view with the scientific concept of a mechanical universe.
The New World was a lesson for Europe about the extent of the possibilities of creation. Believers accepted the infinity of real American “monster” animals such as the armadillo or the manatee that were described or brought back by explorers, confirming that such creatures still walked the earth and swam the seas. Imagination ran wild: the gentlest monster, the “Scythian lamb” or “borametz,” which reportedly grew on a stalk like a vegetable, was presented as fact on the frontispiece of John Parkinson�
�s compendium, Paradisus in Sole, Paradisus Terrestris (1629).
Curiosity and Delight
Unlike most women who came to America in the first generations of settlement, Grizzell was no English provincial growing up in what the historian Carol Berkin has called “the comforting sameness of a parish or village life.” She belonged to a worldly and well-educated metropolitan gentry family with court connections, and as such, unlike many of her cohort, she was, until the age of fifteen when she emigrated, inevitably immersed in the richness and flamboyance of England’s late Renaissance.
The usual assumption about New England’s earliest women settlers is that they were heroically bent on reproducing the households they had left behind. Of course they were. They believed that the tasks of shaping a home and bearing children were their godly mission. Their bodies were their destiny. But because they quickly became aware of how much their new environment could shape them, they were forced to come to grips with a nature foreign to them—peoples and their cultures, animals, plants, and the very different seasons—and to adapt. And because English colonists “recognized the power of the inspirited natural world to both harm and heal them,” writes the historian Susan Scott Parrish, women (and men) also acknowledged immanent supernatural forces, whether manifested in other humans as witches and changelings, or in the unknown forests, or in the mighty power of the Lord to assist in famine or sickness.
Few colonial women’s diaries or letters from before 1750 have been found. The first women’s “travel” writings were memoirs of captivity, such as Mary Rowlandson’s bestselling account of her travails as a prisoner of the Narragansett Indians in 1676. Memorable female characters speak up from time to time in early colonial court and town records, often retailing trenchant gossip about Goody This and Goodman That. But their voices say little about the natural world except as an endurance trial.