All the Best Rubbish

by Ivor Noel Hume

  John died in 1662 and shortly afterward Ashmole visited his widow and demanded delivery of the deed. Hester told him that it had been destroyed, but Ashmole took her to court and had the agreement re-established. Nevertheless, Hester still had the collection, the house, and the garden—and Ashmole waited. In April, 1669, he bought the house next door and moved in beside her, presumably so that he could keep a proprietary eye on his inheritance. Before the year was out he had used an alleged robbery attempt as an excuse to prevail upon Hester to let him take the cream of the rarities into his protective custody. On November 26 she agreed, and a week later the move began.

  The wrangle over the Tradescants’ Cabinett of Rarities is a classic example of the power of inanimate objects to dominate the lives of otherwise sane, relatively educated, and respectable people, turning them into monsters and harridans ready to destroy each other’s characters and reputations in order to gain possession of an assemblage of stuffed heads, rocks, oddities, and vegetables. It was a tale infinitely more bizarre than Henry James’s classic novel The Spoils of Poynton.

  Hester Tradescant continued to live in the depleted Ark, tending the garden and receiving old friends whom she regaled with stories of her neighbor’s villainies. In 1676 Ashmole, an enthusiastic litigant, took her to court to force a retraction of some of Hester’s more colorful accusations, and again he won. Less than two years later, on April 4, 1678, Ashmole was able to breathe a sign of relief and satisfaction, noting in his diary: “My wife told me, Mrs Tradescant was found drowned in her pond. She was drowned the day before about noon, as appeared by some circumstances.”4 It is hard to imagine that this could have been Ashmole’s only epitaph to the last of the Tradescants, once such close friends without whom there would be no collection for him to enjoy. Eleven months later Ashmole purchased the Tradescant house and thus secured the last of the spoils, the contents of the garden. In her book The Tradescants, Their Plants, Gardens and Museum, 1570–1662, Mea Allen has noted the final irony. At the back of John Tradescant’s own copy of herbalist John Parkinson’s Paradisus Terrestris (1629), Ashmole wrote a list of “Trees found in Mrs. Tredescants Ground when it came into my possession.”5 He could not even spell her name.

  The widow Tradescant did not live to see the foundations of the Ashmolean Museum laid at Oxford, and perhaps it was better that she was spared Elias’s triumph; on the other hand, she was denied the satisfaction of knowing that an important part of his collection would never be seen. Ashmole’s apartments in the Middle Temple were destroyed by fire on January 26, 1679/80, and in them his collections of antiquities and “curiosities of nature.” His library and the rest of his collection was housed at Lambeth and thus escaped, and it was there that diarist John Evelyn went in July, 1678. He found Ashmole “not learned, but very industrious…. He showed me a toad included in amber,” Evelyn wrote. “The famous John Tradescant bequeathed his Repository to this gentleman, who has given them to the University of Oxford.”6

  Ashmole died in 1692 and was buried in Lambeth parish church, the place at the east end of the south aisle marked by a substantial slab of blue marble. Outside, in the churchyard, in a tomb destined to be ravaged by centuries of London weather, lay the Tradescants: John the Elder; Jane, his wife; John the Younger; his son, and Hester, at whose direction the tomb was built (Fig. 15). Rebuilt in 1853, the sides are decorated in bas-relief with representations of Egyptian and Grecian ruins, shells, trees, and animals, and on the top are carved the names of its occupants, along with the following lines:

  Know stranger, ere thou pass, beneath this stone

  Lye John Tradescant, grandsire, father, son:

  The last dy’d in his spring: the other two

  Lived till they had travell’d Art and Nature through,

  As by their choice collections may appear:

  Of what is rare, in land, in sea, in air:

  Whilst they (as Homer’s Iliad in a nut)

  A world of wonders in one closet shut:

  These famous Antiquarians that had been

  Both Gardiners to the Rose and Lily Queen

  Transplanted now themselves, sleep here: And when

  Angels shall with their trumpets waken men,

  And fire shall purge the world, these hence shall rise

  And change this Garden for a Paradise.

  The bones of the Tradescants still lie in Lambeth churchyard waiting for the last trump; meanwhile the world has buried them deep beneath the memory of Elias Ashmole, whose name and fame will endure at least as long as there is an Oxford University and an Ashmolean Museum. The injustice to the shades of the Tradescants might have been more tolerable had the respect in which Ashmole was held been enough to insure the permanent safety of the collection. But it was not.

  15. The tomb monument to the Tradescants in the churchyard of St. Mary’s, Lambeth. The original was designed by John Tradescant, Jr.’s widow, was restored in 1773, and entirely reconstructed in 1853 with a heavier emphasis on Egyptian antiquities. The pylon to the right of the relief is absent from drawings of the first tomb and probably was then unrecognized as being typical of surviving ancient Egyptian architecture.

  In 1738, Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia described “The Museum at Oxford, called the Ashmolean Museum” as “a noble pile erected at the expense of the university, for the promoting and carrying on several parts of curious and useful learning.” Completed in 1683, the museum housed “a valuable collection of curiosities…presented to the university by Elias Ashmole Esq; and the same day there deposited, and afterwards digested and put in a just order by Dr. Plot.” Already the Tradescant name had disappeared, and the reference to curator Plot’s digestion indicates that the collection had been shorn of much of its order before it reached the museum. This is hardly surprising, for having been hauled from Lambeth to Oxford in twelve large carts it is easy to conceive of ample opportunity for damage and curatorial chaos. The encyclopedia went on to say that “Divers considerable accessions have been since made to the museum; as of hieroglyphics, and other Egyptian antiquities, by Dr. Huntingdon; and of an entire mummy by Mr. Goodyear; of a cabinet of natural rarities by Dr. Lister; also of divers Roman antiquities, altars, medals, lamps, &c.”

  Thus, over the years, the original Ashmole–Tradescant Collection became no more than the grain of sand around which a pearl was to grow. As travel and expanding knowledge broadened men’s minds, much that had been rare, shining, and strange in the seventeenth century had become commonplace, dull, and even an embarrassment a hundred years later. Few educated men still believed in dragons or unicorns, or in the “tayle” feathers of the phoenix, nor did they believe in the Great Roc and its ability to truss an elephant. Nevertheless, in 1845, the anonymous author of Old England: A Pictorial Museum, in writing about the Ashmolean Museum recalled the Tradescants, saying: “They believed in griffins; and rocs that can truss elephants; and why not? Did not the historian Sindbad see the birds? And yet, while we smile at these credulities, we forget how often they are in truth no credulities at all, but the mere readiness of the believer to own that there may be more mysteries in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in men’s philosophy. The men of science of the present day,” the Victorian author went on, “who would have rejected with scorn the Tradescants’ relics of the griffin and the roc,—would, no doubt, have done the same with the marvellous relic of the dodo…. We own we would like to inquire at the museum what has become of the griffin and the roc—or their representative fragments.”7 In 1971 I made my own pilgrimage to Oxford to ask that very question, but I could find no one in the museum who knew the answer.

  If, in some Oxford attic, Tradescant’s “claw of the bird Rock” still survives, it will probably turn out to be no more than a stem from the raphia palm whose fronds were brought back from Madagascar as examples of the bird’s feathers, and which may also have been the source of the “feathers of the Phoenix tayle.” But do we really want to be sure? In a world that can still amaze us with a coela
canth or a walking catfish, and which once was home to the Brontosaurus excelsus and the flying Pterodactyl, surely there is room for a giant bird that fed elephants to its young? And what of the Tradescants’ “Dodar, from the Island of Mauritius” that was so churlishly christened Didus ineptus, it being “not able to flie being so big”? This is believed to have been the bird that was exhibited alive in London in about 1638, but it is presumed to have been dead before it entered the Ark. Nevertheless, the catalogue listed it under “Whole BIRDS,” and it remained so until 1755 when, by decree of the university’s vice-chancellor and the museum’s trustees it was ordered to be removed and destroyed. It was in fact burned, though someone with a conscience salvaged the head and one foot, and those still survive in the University Museum (Fig. 16).

  For those of us who think of giving our collections to museums, the sad tale of the dodo serves as a reminder that the judgment of trustees is not always to be trusted. When the order was given to destroy the Tradescants’ dodo, the species had been extinct for more than seventy years, and a century would pass before another intact skeleton would be found to enable ornithologists to reconstruct a model of the bird. As for the feathers, the world can only take the word of those lay bird watchers who saw the dodo on Mauritius or who visited the Ark and reported that the plumage was ash-colored, the breast and tail white, and the wings a whitish yellow.

  16. The skinned head of the Tradescants’ dodo. The bird had been exhibited alive in London in about 1638 before entering the Ark—presumably feet first. In poor condition in 1755, the unique specimen was ordered to be destroyed and all but the head and one foot was burned. These melancholy remains survive in the University Museum at Oxford.

  THREE

  Cabinets, Closets, and Dubitable Curiosities

  THE VAST MAJORITY of the people who went to Lambeth to see the Tradescant Collection did so to be amazed rather than to learn; but before we condemn the seventeenth-century public for any shallowness of purpose, it does not hurt to remind ourselves that the world’s largest stuffed elephant is still the centerpiece of the Smithsonian Institution’s natural history museum in Washington, and that visitors remember it long after they have forgotten the okapi or the speckled snail. It is still true, too, that our capacity for amazement is enhanced by a modicum of bibulosity; consequently it need come as no surprise that in the eighteenth century some of the most celebrated collections of curiosities were housed in taverns and coffee houses.

  One of the best remembered coffee-house collections was owned by a certain Don Saltero who, in 1717, was in business in Chelsea at No. 18, Cheyne Walk. He had previously earned a small niche in literary history through being satirized by Richard Steele in The Tatler. The catalogue of the Saltero collection smacked of the Musaeum Tradescantianum (which apparently was no accident) and included such wonders as “A Piece of Queen Catherine’s skin…A painted ribbon from Jerusalem with which our Saviour was tied to the pillar when scourged…Instruments for scratching Chinese ladies’ backs…A pair of nun’s stockings…A starved cat found between the walls of Westminster Abbey when repairing,” and “Queen Elizabeth’s chambermaid’s hat.” Commented Steele: “He shows you a straw hat, which I know to be made by Madge Peskad, within three miles of Bedford; and tells you ‘It is Pontius Pilot’s Wife’s chambermaid’s sister’s hat!!’” Steele added that the Don was not descended, as he claimed, from John Tradescant, “but from that memorable companion of the Knight of Mancha.”1

  None of the eighteenth century’s tavern collections survives, though many “olde inns” around the British Isles possess collections of horse brasses, man-traps, post horns, copper flagons, blunderbusses, and the like. As a rule, these displays’ only relationship to their predecessors lies in the short measure of truth contained in the landlords’ claims for them. Such rarities as are to be seen (with the possible exception of Dirty Dick’s in London) have usually been installed by brewery interior decorators.

  Besides the collections displayed in eighteenth-century taverns, there were others in now unidentifiable London apartments where, for a small fee, one could enjoy two or three rooms’ worth of amazement. The German bibliophile Zacharius Conrad von Uffenback visited one of them in 1710 and found that it offered, among other things, a considerable collection of coins, some old musical instruments, a large Indian crab, a life-size wax figure of Cleopatra clasping her asp, and what passed for the head of Oliver Cromwell. The museum’s owner told his visitor that he could get sixty guineas for the head, but Von Uffenbach later noted in his diary that there were many Cromwell heads to be found in England. “With this head of Cromwell there was also the head of a mummy,” he added, “which I should infinitely have preferred.”2

  Britain’s first truly national collection was acquired in the mid-eighteenth century and installed in the elegant Montagu House in London’s Bloomsbury. It comprised three great collections: Sir John Cotton’s library of books and manuscripts which he had given to the nation in 1700; Sir Robert Harley’s manuscripts; and Sir Hans Sloane’s much more varied collection of manuscripts, antiquities, coins, prints, precious stones, and natural history specimens. The Harley and Sloane collections were not gifts; they were acquired by means of a national lottery authorized by Act of Parliament in 1753. The money was also to be used to “provide one General Repository for the better Reception and more convenient Use of the said Collections, and of the Cottonian Library and the additions thereto.” Thus did the British Museum come into being. Although designated as the home of national treasures and launched with money obtained from the populace, the museum was at first by no means as public as it is today. Up until 1820 it was open but three days a week, and then only to those who had made application in advance, admission being limited to five groups of fifteen people per day. When the young American Benjamin Silliman visited the museum in 1805, he noted in his journal: “The, museum is now shut for two months.”3

  Silliman would later be described as the most prominent and influential scientific man in America during the first half of the nineteenth century. For fifty-two years he was Yale University’s professor of chemistry and natural history, and as such one might expect him to have had little time for the wonderment and romanticism so characteristic of naturalists and antiquarians of the preceding centuries; but not a bit of it! Describing the British Museum’s classical collection, Silliman wrote: “The Roman vases were extremely beautiful; modern arts have produced nothing superior in workmanship. I must not omit to mention,” he went on, “that I saw the Roman Eagle which was carried aloft in their battles. All these things serve to carry one back to the Roman ages, to identify the past with the present, and to produce a very pleasing impression when you reflect that a Roman hand once held the article which is now in yours.”4

  Nowadays the average visitor to the “B.M.” does not get to grip the goodies, and, ironically, those museum officials and scholars who do will generally go to considerable lengths to assure questioners that they derive no emotional satisfaction from it. Objects are not to be thought of in such childishly evocative terms; they are the remains of material culture, not memorials to the lives of individuals, but computer fodder to be reconstituted into cultural patterns. Similarly, many a modern archaeologist will go out of his way to convince us that in his digging he is not trying to prove anything but only to collect data which should not be interpreted until it, too, has been computer analyzed. Meanwhile, the public (whose taxes pay the scholars’ salaries and whose children get the most out of museums) retains a stubborn and disconcerting interest in people, and displays such an ignorance and paucity of taste as to respond more readily to sensations than to statistics. Consequently, most small museums in Britain still get more mileage from their scold’s bridle, whipping post, ducking stool, highwayman’s boots, fossil footprints, and old fire engines than from their cabinets of coins and their type series of Acheulian, flint hand axes and Mousterian choppers. Although a faded slave poster may substitute for the whipping post,
or a Civil War saddle for the highwayman’s boot, the curators of America’s lesser museums must cater to the same public. We are still ready and willing to be astounded by the largest this or the smallest that, still suckers for what, in the eighteenth century was called a raree-show—providing it is served to us in a contemporary and dramatic fashion.

  Display techniques have never been as important as they are today; the medium, as Marshall McLuhan has pointed out, being as commanding as the message. But an eye-catching setting has always been appreciated, as we learn from Benjamin Silliman when he visited the Leverian Museum in London in 1805. He was much taken with the museum’s ornithological display, calling it “a grand collection of birds in fine preservation, and beautifully, although not scientifically, arranged, in a Rotunda, with an interior gallery. In this,” Silliman added, “the cases are placed, and the whole is illuminated by a fine sky light”5 (Fig. 17).

  The Leverian Museum was the late eighteenth century’s version of the Tradescants’ Ark. Assembled by Sir Ashton Lever of Alkerington Hall, near Manchester, it was first displayed in London at Leicester House in what is now Leicester Square. Lever is reputed to have lavished more than £50,000 on the collection (a tremendous sum for that date), making it the most distinguished “cabinet of curiosities” in all Europe, none being “more rare, more curious, or more instructive.” One visitor was so impressed that he sat down and composed lengthy verses in praise of it. Written in 1778 and later published in the Gentleman’s Magazine, they began as follows: