The Time Traveller’s Guide to Restoration Britain

by Ian Mortimer

  Foreign visitors and domestic travellers alike all want to see Stonehenge. It is counted one of the wonders of Britain by almost everyone who mentions it. Celia Fiennes, John Aubrey and Samuel Pepys all visit. Evelyn sees it and describes it as ‘a stupendous monument’.42 Monsieur Misson declares that the stones are ‘a rarity worth a man’s while to go a great journey to see’ and adds that

  it is impossible to conceive either that they grew there or that they were brought thither or what use they could be designed for. This has given occasion to abundance of enquiries and to very long dissertations, and after all we are just as wise as we were before.43

  He is quite right in that last assertion. Some people think that giants built it in ancient times, others think it is Saxon; some consider it the work of the Danes or Vikings, and Inigo Jones reckons it is Roman. Schellinks visits and outlines some of the theories he has heard, such as that it was brought by Merlin from Ireland, and that it was erected as a memorial by the Roman general who fought the Saxons, Ambrosius Aurelianus. Even Grand Duke Cosimo III alights from his carriage with Lorenzo Magalotti to view the stones in 1669 and, like everyone else, they are impressed by the dimensions and the engineering feat required to raise the upper stones into place. When Evelyn takes a chisel and tries to chop a bit off, he finds the stones harder than he thought. As the potential for archaeology to reveal our distant past is just beginning to dawn on learned men such as John Aubrey and John Conyers, Stonehenge stands as an icon of the combined sophistication and mystery of the unrecorded past.44

  Apart from Stonehenge, it is the cathedrals and stately homes that attract the discerning traveller. Most of these will be open to you as long as you are of high enough social standing – you won’t find the servants at Chatsworth showing labourers around the palatial rooms or the gardens. In case the idea of knocking on a duke’s front door and asking to have a look around still worries you, rest assured: it is rare that an important man forbids travelling gentlemen and ladies a view of his house and gardens. If he has orange trees and Celia Fiennes comes by and asks to see them, of course he will want to show them off to her. If his home is a fine Tudor residence with splendid furniture newly imported from France, of course he will welcome visitors who might regale other people with tales of the history of his family and the fineness of his furnishings, and thereby increase his social standing.

  Museums

  The gentleman’s residence is the place where you will find the most interesting collections. Not only do gentlemen have the wherewithal to buy the best artefacts, they also have the necessary contacts to acquire them, the education to appreciate them, the space to keep them and – most of all – the desire to show them off. Thus learned men from the late sixteenth century on take great pride in their ‘cabinet of curiosities’: a room in their house devoted to interesting objects, normally of an ancient or exotic nature, which cause people to marvel, reflect or think differently about the world.

  The grandfather of all these museums is Tradescant’s Ark, a collection put together by John Tradescant the elder and his son, John Tradescant the younger. The elder John travels far and wide collecting rare specimens of plants and other interesting items, including trips to Russia and North Africa. His son travels three times to America searching for new flowers, plants, minerals and shells. Both men also have a wide array of contacts who send back exotic specimens from abroad, and they have useful connections with the nobility, who urge their own agents to send intriguing items to the Tradescants. In this way, by 1638 the Tradescants’ collection has acquired a pre-eminent status amongst museums in England. Among many other things, they have the following items on show in that year:

  two ribs of a whale … a salamander; a chameleon; a pelican; a remora; a lanhado from Africa; a white partridge … a flying squirrel; another squirrel like a fish; all kinds of bright-coloured birds from India; a number of things changed into stone, among them a piece of human flesh on a bone … all kinds of shells; the hand of a mermaid; the hand of a mummy … all kinds of precious stones; coins; a picture wrought in feathers; a small piece of wood from the cross of Christ … two cups of rhinoceros horn … Indian arrows such as are used by the executioners in the West Indies – when a man is condemned to death, they lay open his back with them and he dies of it … the robe of the King of Virginia; a few goblets of agate; a girdle such as the Turks wear in Jerusalem; the passion of Christ carved very daintily on a plum stone; a large magnet stone … a scourge with which Charles V is said to have scourged himself; a hat band of snake bones …45

  In case you’re wondering, ‘the robe of the king of Virginia’ is a huge deerskin cloak stitched with thousands of white shells that once belonged to Powhatan, chief of the Virginian Native Americans and father of Pocahontas. But all this hardly gives you any idea how rich and diverse the museum is. In 1656 a 183-page description of the collection is published: Musæum Tradescantianum, or a Collection of Rarities preserved at South Lambeth, near London, the first museum catalogue to appear in Britain. When the younger John Tradescant dies six years later, he leaves the collection to Elias Ashmole. Ashmole combines the Tradescants’ museum with his own and donates everything to the University of Oxford in 1683, where it is exhibited in a new purpose-built building, the Ashmolean Museum.

  The Ashmolean is unusual in that it opens its doors to the public. Anyone can visit, on payment of a small entry fee. Many gentlemen are dismayed by this: they do not wish to share their visitor experience with the ranks of ‘ordinary folk’. Tough, I say, if that’s your view. The museum in Chetham’s Hospital in Manchester is similarly aimed at the public. You will need to have the right contacts if you wish to see the East India Company’s collections, including their birds of paradise, on show at India House. Sir Thomas Browne’s London residence does not so much have a cabinet of curiosities, but is one: there you may see his famous egg collection as well as his assorted medals, books, plants, and so on. Ralph Thoresby not only visits all the museums in the country, but manages his family’s own museum in Leeds, which is especially strong in its coin collections. By the end of our period the most sought-after tickets in London are to the immense cabinet of curiosities belonging to William Charlton (reputedly worth £50,000), the Royal Society’s own collections in Gresham College, and the collection being formed now by Sir Hans Sloane, a wealthy physician. Sir Hans is only forty years old when the century ends – he still has more than fifty years of life left in him – but when he finally dies, he will possess an unrivalled collection. It not only includes Charlton’s collection (which will be bequeathed to him) but many of the other major collections now being formed in England, including those of explorers like William Dampier. And, inspired by Ashmole, Sloane does a very good thing: he hands his museum over to the nation, thereby making it available for everyone to see. It will one day become the foundation collection of a new British Museum.46

  Fine Art

  Country houses and royal palaces double up as the nation’s art galleries.If you consider that there are more than 16,000 gentlemen and people of similar high status in England in the 1690s, and if they have an average of just 15 paintings each (and some have ten times that number), then they possess about 240,000 artworks between them. If the greater clergy, men in administrative offices, greater merchants and lawyers – a total of 24,000 men – have an average of just 5 paintings a head, then they possess a total of 120,000 artworks. Add the thousands of artworks distributed amongst the royal palaces, urban guildhalls, livery companies, captains’ cabins in ships of the line, and the art gallery that forms part of the Bodleian Library, and you can see there are probably in excess of 400,000 paintings in England – to say nothing of those in Scotland and Wales. Of course, there are hundreds of thousands of prints too. There is now an ‘art world’ in Britain that simply didn’t exist a hundred years ago. If you are an aficionado of fine art in the Restoration period, you can have months of fun travelling around the country viewing the collections of your fellow ge
ntlemen.

  John Evelyn is a good example. He has been to Italy and seen the paintings of Leonardo and many other old masters in situ. Nowadays, based very close to London, he does not need to travel far to continue his interest. Every time he goes to Whitehall he can pop into the Banqueting House, look up and see the ceiling painted by Rubens. Elsewhere in the palace – which the artist Schellinks describes as ‘full of outstanding paintings by old and new Italian, Dutch and other masters’ – he can seek out paintings by Raphael, Holbein and Titian. In 1676, when dining with the Lord Chamberlain, he views a Raphael, a Leonardo and two paintings by van Dyck. Three years later, when dining at Buckingham House, he is able to inspect Titian’s Venus and Adonis as well as other paintings by Titian, Bassano and van Dyck. Such is his knowledge of fine art that he is sought out by friends to accompany them to auctions. When Lord Melford falls on hard times and has to sell his collection in 1693, Evelyn goes along with friends and sees the hammer come down on a Murillo composition for £84 (which he deems ‘dear enough’) and a portrait by Rubens for £20. (Yes, I know what you’re thinking: a Rubens for just twenty quid is a very good reason to visit Restoration Britain.) The following year he sees Corregio’s Venus – acquired by Lord Mulgrave for £250 – which he declares ‘one of the best paintings that I ever saw’. Clearly, if Old Masters are your thing, then the lack of a public ‘national gallery’ need not prevent you from indulging in your passion.47

  In assessing artworks at this time, you will hear people talking in terms of the ‘hierarchy of genres’. This is first promulgated by the French writer André Félibien in 1667 and very quickly adopted across Europe. According to this philosophy, the most important artworks are those of a historical and religious nature, of which the supreme examples are allegorical. Next in the hierarchy are portraits, followed by paintings of everyday life, such as a housemaid washing a doorstep or a housewife gutting fish. Fourth are landscapes; fifth, paintings of living animals; and at the bottom of the pile, pictures of dead animals and still-life paintings. This gradation has nothing to do with the skill required and everything to do with a painting’s message: it is much easier to impart a moral lesson through depicting people and events than it is by merely showing animals and objects. A historical picture of the fall of Rome thus has meaning in the way that a goose on a pond or a flower in a pot frankly doesn’t. It is important to realise that seventeenth-century people think like this: on the one hand, you have art; and on the other, you have mere pictures.

  Everywhere you look, in the galleries of the great and the grand, you will see the lasting influence of Sir Anthony van Dyck. He was born in Antwerp in 1599, studied with Rubens, travelled extensively in Italy and lived intermittently in London until his death in 1641. His legacy was nothing short of a new style of portraiture in England. One glimpse at an English painting and you can see from the naturalism, pose and expression of character whether it is a pre- or post-van Dyck work. He also assisted in the purchase by Charles I of many Continental art collections, including that of the Gonzaga dukes of Mantua. Thus, even though he has been dead for nearly twenty years, you will still hear his name mentioned everywhere that fine art is appreciated. He is to British art at this time what Inigo Jones is to British architecture – the late-lamented father of all that is deemed excellent.

  There are many good artists working in Britain in the wake of van Dyck. Indeed, the Restoration heralds a veritable invasion of artistic talent from the Continent. First and foremost is Sir Peter Lely, who steps into the role that van Dyck occupied prior to the Civil Wars. Born in Westphalia in 1618, Lely arrives in London soon after van Dyck’s death and paints for a string of aristocratic clients. When Charles II returns to Britain in 1660, Lely is well qualified to slip into the role he always wanted: that of the king’s principal painter. He portrays the king, the queen, the king’s mistresses, the duke and duchess of York and many members of the aristocracy, as well as producing a few religious paintings. He also paints sets of portraits, including The Windsor Beauties (three-quarter-length portraits of a dozen of the most beautiful women at court), a similar set of ‘beauties’ for Lord Spencer’s house at Althorp, and The Flaggmen, the duke of York’s grizzled naval officers in the Second Dutch War (who are about as far from ‘beautiful’ as it is possible to get). If you want your own portrait painted, you will need to book an hour-long sitting at his house on the north side of Covent Garden piazza, where he will sketch your pose and paint your face and hands, and then pass over the work to one of his many assistants for finishing, while charging you the top rates. From 1670 these are £20 for a head study, £30 for a half-length and £60 for a whole-length picture. To put this fee in perspective, the Bristol painter John Roseworme, mentioned in chapter 8, charges just 7s for an ordinary-size portrait and 15s for a large one. Unsurprisingly, Lely grows rich but, rather than investing in a country estate, he spends his money on more art. By the time of his death in 1680 he has amassed one of the greatest art collections in Europe, numbering 575 paintings – including works by Rubens, Tintoretto and Bassano, and no fewer than twenty-four works by van Dyck – and more than 10,000 prints.48

  Lely’s position as the leading society portrait painter is quickly assumed by two other foreign-born artists, Willem Wissing (from Holland) and Sir Godfrey Kneller (from Lübeck), underlining how international the British art scene is in these years. Evelyn goes to have his picture drawn in October 1685 by ‘the famous Kneller’. He sits again for him in 1689, with a copy of his famous book Sylva in his hand, for a portrait to be given to his friend Samuel Pepys. ‘Kneller never painted in more masterly a manner,’ writes Evelyn of that work.49 Evelyn and Pepys are both much less complimentary about the other society portrait painter of the time, John Michael Wright. Pepys notes that there is a world of difference between Lely’s work and Wright’s, when he visits their studios on the same day in June 1662. Evelyn surveys Wright’s portraits of the judges in the Guildhall in 1673, for which the artist has been paid no less than £1,000, and declares, ‘I never took Wright to be any considerable artist.’50 However, it is Wright who paints arguably the most iconic image of the whole Restoration: the full-length crowned figure of Charles II enthroned, holding his orb and sceptre and looking straight at you, as if you are being judged on a charge of high treason. Subtle it isn’t; powerful it most certainly is. And if it is the mark of a good artist to leave a feeling as well as an image imprinted on your mind long after you have moved away from the canvas, then Wright is a good artist, whatever Evelyn says.

  As you tour the country houses of Britain surveying the works of so many painters, you will no doubt find your own favourites. However, since so few of them are remembered in later centuries, it is worth naming a few more. Again, what will strike you is how many are foreign-born and foreign-trained. For example, there are leading portrait painters in John Closterman (born in Osnabrück), Jacob Huysmans (born in Antwerp), Gerard Soest (born in Westphalia) and John Baptist Medina (Spanish, but born in Brussels). For landscapes, you could apply at the studios of Adam de Colonia (born in Rotterdam), Adriaen van Diest (born at The Hague) and Jan Siberechts (born in Antwerp). For history paintings, there is Michael Dahl (from Stockholm); for historical murals on the scale of Verrio, there is Louis Laguerre (from Versailles); and for the finest marine painter of the age, look no further than Willem van de Welde (from Leiden). It is surely not a coincidence that as Britain reaches out and embraces the world – from trading in the Far East to controlling the plantations in the West Indies and the settlements in North America – the rest of Europe embraces Britain and enriches it culturally.

  All this might give you the impression that there are no home-grown artists of note. Far from it. There is an explosion of interest in art amongst the natives too, both at an amateur level and at a professional one. Both Evelyn’s and Pepys’s wives take up painting as a hobby. Ralph Thoresby buys a set of sixty crayons for 2s 6d in 1677 so that he can copy the portraits of the founding fathers of the Prot
estant Church.51 Amongst the professionals there are some striking characters, such as John Greenhill, a pupil of Lely whom some say is as good as his master. Although married, he is the heart-throb of the dramatist Aphra Behn, but he lives in an extremely dissolute manner in Covent Garden and eventually dies in a drunken stupor at the age of thirty-five. Then there is Isaac Fuller, another heavy-drinking artist, who paints naked nymphs by the dozen on the ceilings of Oxford college chapels, and similar themes on the walls of London taverns. He also produces portraits of writers and a vibrant, if somewhat bizarre; series of history paintings recounting Charles II’s escape from the Battle of Worcester. Fuller’s pupil, John Riley, who is far more mannered than his master in his painting as well as his lifestyle, becomes a court painter after the accession of William and Mary; he too displays a streak of unorthodoxy in that he paints grand, full-length portraits of royal servants, including Bridget Holmes, the woman in charge of emptying the king’s chamber pot. Alongside these mavericks you have the perfectionists: the best miniaturists of the age are Samuel Cooper at the start of our period and Thomas Flatman at the end, both of whom have the uncanny ability to make you feel that you are the one being observed through the tiny frame, and that the sitter is in the real world, gazing at you. John Scougal emerges as the pre-eminent portrait painter in Scotland. Robert Robinson tries single-handedly to eclipse the hierarchy of the genres by producing accomplished work in every form, from history and allegory down to landscape, still-life and genre works. The even more versatile Robert Streater produces pioneering landscapes that are the equal of most Dutch specialists. Not only that, but he paints the ceiling of the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, which Pepys, Wren and their friends go to see in 1669, whereupon some of the company declare his work to be comparable with that of Rubens.52 Despite the generally low opinion of animal painting and still life, Francis Barlow devotes his career to producing exquisite paintings of birds and animals and compensates for the ‘lowness’ of his art by becoming the first professional etcher in Britain.53 Nor should we forget Marmaduke Craddock, who produces paintings of birds of such liveliness and colour that you cannot help but smile. True, most of them are ducks, so no one will ever compare a Craddock with a Rubens, but he has his place. You will know what I mean when you see one of his ducks.