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The Diary of John Evelyn
From: The British Library
| By:
Frances Harris |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
The diary of John Evelyn has long been recognised as a vivid self-portrait of one of the most attractive figures of seventeenth-century England. It is the personal chronicle of a gentleman scholar, a notable gardener, an early environmentalist, a public administrator, a committed lay representative of the Anglican Church, and much else besides.
In 1995 the British Library acquired Evelyn's extensive archive, including the manuscript of his famous diary, which was first published in the nineteenth century. In an interview with Fathom, Frances Harris, senior curator in the Department of Manuscripts at the British Library, reflects on what the diary reveals about Evelyn's complex and fascinating character. |
Fathom: Who was John Evelyn? |
Frances Harris: John Evelyn is best known, I think, in association with Samuel Pepys. They are the two best-loved diarists of the seventeenth century. Evelyn was Pepys's close friend and colleague, and it's fitting that they weren't just writing their diaries at the same time; they were also working together. |
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| Portrait of John Evelyn, by Sir Peter Lely. | |
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They came to know each other first in 1665, when Pepys was a naval administrator and Evelyn a new and untried but conscientious and idealistic Commissioner for Sick and Wounded Seamen. This was also their annus horribilis: the first year of the Second Dutch War, when the plague was also raging. They had the most impossible task of providing for the seamen--including many Dutch prisoners, who were left sick and wounded after the battles at sea--in the most difficult circumstances, when the mechanisms of government finance had broken down and the hospital provision was desperately inadequate. |
They found they had a common bond in their commitment to their duty. Pepys was by far the more experienced official of the two at that point. But he was also the younger by several years and was very much impressed and even rather overwhelmed by Evelyn's intellectual abilities and air of conscious superiority. As he puts it in his diary, Evelyn was a most excellent person and "must be allowed a little for conceitedness but he may well be so, being a man so much above others." |
I think the interest in comparing them lies in the difference between their diaries. Pepys's diary is of course very well known. It's a very intimate and private record; it contains things which he would never have spoken of to anyone. In fact, it was such a private record that he kept it in shorthand. But clearly it was very important for him to write it down, to express himself in this way. It was part of his engagement with life in all its detail. |
Because we know him so thoroughly through the diary, it's easy to forget that it deals with quite a short period of his life: only a decade of his young manhood. Evelyn's is less a diary, although that is what it is commonly called, and more a personal chronicle or a memoir. It begins with an account of his birth, in 1620, when James I is still on the throne, and he's still writing it in a spidery hand of extreme old age when he's 85 and Queen Anne is on the throne. |
So it's very much the record of his whole life. It's also very much a public record. Unlike Pepys's diary, it contains no scandalous revelations. There's nothing in it that his grandchildren couldn't read, and indeed his descendants were very proud of it and preserved it carefully. |
The diary has been published in a very fine modern edition and is an important historical source. But Evelyn was much else besides a diarist. In his own day he was best known as what I think we would today call an environmentalist. |
He was the most influential gardener of the Restoration period. But he was much more than a gardener; he was a planter, and his concerns embraced the whole of the rural as well as the urban environment. He wrote and published many books, some of them translations, but his most famous was called Sylva, a work on forestry and tree planting. |
Like many Royalists, he had a strong sense that this resource, on which the nation's defence and economy depended, had been systematically depleted during the interregnum in a politically treacherous way, by the grubbing up of royal woods and forests and turning them into tillage. It was the duty of his generation to restore them. Trees were not just a valuable resource; groves and forests were numinous to him, places of beauty, inspiring reflection and meditation. So he believed that not just the economy but the whole environment and the human spirit could be restored through tree planting. |
Sylva is a lovely book to read even today, a compendium of practical advice as well as a celebration of woods and forests. It explains how to plant and cultivate individual species, from the great deciduous natives to the evergreens and exotics of the warmer Mediterranean countries. It's a heartwarming book, full of affectionate detail. Evelyn obviously had a great fondness for these plants, a kind of human warmth. In his own day the book was enormously successful, going into four enlarged editions in his lifetime. He claimed, and rightly so, that it influenced a whole generation and changed its attitude to tree planting. Because it incorporates such a wide range of human attitudes to the green environment, I think it's easily his most attractive legacy to us. |
Fathom: Was he writing the diary with the intention that it was to be published? |
Harris: That's complicated. Certainly he didn't intend to publish or print it himself, in the way that he published some of his other works. But the term "publish" would have meant something rather different to him than what it means to us. He must have expected the diary to be seen by others, even if they were only the members of his family, and in that sense he did intend it to be published. Perhaps he never foresaw that it would be edited, annotated and read by so many strangers. Still, creating a deliberate record of that kind seems to suggest an intention that it should survive, be passed down and read by future generations. So, who knows. |
But first and foremost, for his own purposes it was an educative document. Many of his generation who were influenced by the new science took up Francis Bacon's precept about diary keeping, especially during a period of travel. As you used your commonplace books to write down notes from your reading, so you used a diary to write down what has happened to you, what you have seen, whom you have spoken to, so that you won't forget, so that it becomes part of your intellectual record and can be drawn upon later. |
Evelyn will write down, for example, a description of seeing a whale stranded in the Thames, or his responses to the sights of Rome or Paris, or the times when he had an audience with the King. It's also a spiritual document. There are a lot of sermon notes. It has a strong emphasis on a guiding providence, and on the moral lessons to be drawn from what had happened to him. |
Fathom: He spent a number of years out of the country before coming back after the Civil War. And he obviously prided himself on being a cosmopolitan figure. What impact did his travels have? |
Harris: I think they were very much part of his intellectual mission, although he set out initially for practical and personal reasons. He was a Royalist in sympathy and he had estates in Surrey and Sussex, which lay in the power of Parliament after the first defeats of the Royalist army. He was advised that if he openly rode with the King, these estates would be forfeit and would be more of an asset to his enemies than Evelyn's personal support would be to the Royalists. |
It's clear in any case that he didn't have military aspirations. So he went abroad, to put himself out of the way, to preserve his estates and also as a matter of personal development. It wasn't necessarily an easy option. Travelling then could be very strenuous and quite hazardous. He didn't go just to pass the time, or to collect superficial experiences; he really intended to use the trip to educate himself very thoroughly. He felt that his early life, his schooling and his time at university had been rather frittered away, that he hadn't applied himself as he should have done, and this was his way of correcting it. |
I also think he had a strong sense that England, and especially London at that time, came off rather badly in comparison with the great cities of the Continent--Rome and Paris in particular. Its houses were chiefly of wood; the streets were narrow; it was all rather ramshackle. The rain poured down from the roofs and gutterings and deluged you as you passed by. It wasn't a regular city in the way some of the cities of Renaissance Europe were, and he wanted to improve it. For all its economic importance, for all the brilliance of its literature, England also seemed to lag behind in some areas of the arts. |
Evelyn used his travels to master French and to some extent Italian, and he set himself a programme of translation of important works on art and architecture and gardens. This really was out of a sense of duty, because I don't think he found it a very congenial task in itself. But it was a practical way of making the useful knowledge and culture of Europe known and practised in England. |
Fathom: Evelyn enjoyed a seemingly happy marriage, but his close relationship with a younger woman, Margaret Blagge, attracted much attention at the time, and has continued to do so. |
Harris: Yes, it's a very interesting episode. The young woman was Margaret Blagge, a maid of honour at the Restoration court. Her father was a military man, a Royalist, a much more actively involved one than Evelyn. He died shortly after the Restoration and she came to court because it was a way for an attractive young woman to be launched in society, to make a better marriage than she might otherwise have hoped for. Margaret, like Evelyn, was a devout Anglican and was conspicuous for her piety in a somewhat sleazy and disreputable court. She came to know Evelyn by chance while visiting friends who lived near his house in Deptford. Feeling isolated after the death of her mother, she turned to him at first for advice in her financial affairs. |
Evelyn had always insisted that he could have platonic friendships with women without risk to his marriage or to the reputation of either party. He clearly felt that such friendships were an important aspect of a fully lived life, something quite apart from his marriage, however satisfactory this was in itself. But he says that he'd often been disappointed in those he had thought of in this light. Margaret Blagge at last seemed his ideal: she was beautiful and devout, and she had turned to him for practical and then for spiritual guidance. We could of course be ready to read more into any such relationship, and I think there's no question that Evelyn did become far more emotionally involved with her, in a more uncontrolled way, than he'd anticipated or found easy. |
The interesting part of the relationship is how he dealt with this situation, given that she was engaged to someone else, and that he was a married man with many family commitments. Any sexual expression of the relationship was not possible. He was not prepared to relinquish the relationship, but he managed to construct a context in their shared devotional lives, in which to conduct it and contain its difficulties and its tensions. |
Margaret eventually married Sidney Godolphin, a future prime minister of England, and the friendship with Evelyn continued after her marriage. But at the birth of her first child she developed puerperal sepsis, for which there was absolutely no treatment at that time, and she died. Evelyn was devastated by the loss. As some consolation he commemorated her in a spiritual biography, although this was circulated only amongst her friends and not published until the nineteenth century. She was only in her twenties when she died, and apart from her friendship with Evelyn her life was quite an obscure one. That friendship has been the means by which she has become known to us. |
Fathom: After the Restoration of Charles II, what kind of public role did Evelyn play? |
Harris: I think he had quite startlingly high public ambitions to start with. There was a revealing episode, just before the Restoration, in which he tried strenuously to persuade a former school friend, Colonel Morley, who was then governor of the Tower of London, to take the initiative in declaring for the King while General Monk was still on his march south. If this plan had succeeded, Evelyn said afterward, Morley would have been made a duke, "and I God knows what." It didn't turn out that way at all, but the episode does show that he was ready to play a very risk-taking part in events. |
Afterward he quite rapidly found that he wasn't really suited to a political life at court. He once said to Pepys, "I can't bustle," and that expresses it quite well. He found trying to anticipate motives and play one person off against another too stressful and difficult. Still, he did continue to see himself as a kind of humanist counsellor, someone who would keep the secretary of state, for example, up to date on intellectual affairs and cultural trends, who would take commissions to write on behalf of the government. He was also very useful on unglamorous but necessary committees, for repairing the sewers and paving the streets, for example, or as Commissioner for Sick and Wounded Seamen. So he did find a public role. |
Fathom: He lived, as Pepys did, through two of the defining events in London--the Great Plague of 1665 and the Fire of London in the following year. Does one get the sense of those events in his diary? |
Harris: Pepys's diary is probably the most vivid and prolonged account of both of those events, but you do get a strong impression from Evelyn of the sheer trauma of experiencing them. And from him you also get a powerful sense of them as visitations. In the years after the Restoration he became disillusioned with the court. He really feared that the plague and the fire, followed by the great humiliation of the Dutch invasion of the Medway, were unmistakable signs of God's wrath and punishment directed at the nation. |
But he saw the fire, or at least its aftermath, as an opportunity as well. He had complained that London was so ramshackle and irregular compared with some Continental cities. Now it could be rebuilt in a far more regular form, with squares and straight boulevards. He did strongly urge this on the King, but of course he didn't have the qualifications in architecture and surveying, as Christopher Wren did, to back his advice, and he did tend to overlook the fact that while existing buildings had been swept away, property rights remained. The new city was more regular, but not so utterly transformed as Evelyn's utopian scheme suggested it could have been. |
Fathom: Do you think he was fulfilled in the way he lived his life, or do you think he was disappointed? |
Harris: I think he probably was disappointed in some ways. He knew that he'd come to maturity at a difficult time. When the Civil War broke out he was in his early twenties, ready to embark on a public career, to find out how he could be useful to his country. But for a Royalist this wasn't possible; everything was in turmoil. And it was difficult for him later in his life to accept that he didn't have the kinds of abilities for success after the Restoration. He was bitter about this, about being thought fit for nothing but "to blot paper and plant coleworts," as he once put it. But of course his writing and his planting were his great talents and what he is now remembered for. |
He said to his son in one of his letters: "I have many passions to subdue." He obviously was a person who achieved regularity in his private life at considerable cost. It wasn't a straightforward or untroubled process at all, and I don't think he expected it to be. |
Life was difficult and strenuous and dutiful for him. He was all-embracing in his curiosity and passionate in his intellectual pursuits, but you don't get the same sense that you do with Pepys, of a constant welling up of enthusiasm and enjoyment of day-to-day experience. |
Fathom: What happened toward the end of his life, in his old age? |
Harris: It was a great satisfaction to him that he inherited his family's estate at Wotton, in Surrey. He was a second son, a younger brother, and so he wouldn't normally have expected to own it. But he always called it his "most cherished place on earth," the perfect landscape of wood, hills and water, and he says that he had sucked in his affection for it with his very milk. |
He lived there with his wife for the last six or seven years of his life. There is a very touching letter of this time, saying that they enjoyed each other's company there more than in the previous 30 years. It obviously was a time of great tranquillity, when he could let go of his ambitions and pursue his favourite occupation, tree planting. In the fourth edition of Sylva, produced in the last year of his life, he says something to the effect that he would go on planting until he was called to the heavenly plantations. It was the fulfilment he had failed to achieve earlier. |
He obviously had as sound a constitution as a human being can have. He scarcely had a serious illness in his life, though he lived for much of it in Deptford, which was then a very unhealthy, marshy situation. He had survived the plague. In his eighties there is just a gradual winding down. He finds it hard to keep awake during sermons; his handwriting becomes fainter and fainter in his diary. He died in 1706, when he was 85. |
Fathom: Was conceitedness, as Pepys says, his only flaw? |
Harris: I'm sure he wouldn't have said it was his only flaw. He was deeply conscious that he was a sinful being and he had constantly to correct himself. I suppose what we might find less congenial about him is not so much the sense of his own superiority but his constant sense of a superior power exercising moral judgement over all. For him there was always a do and a don't; there were some fundamental certainties which were not to be questioned. They made him more inflexible, less open to all kinds of enjoyment and experience than we would find attractive. But perhaps they are a useful corrective, even so. |
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