Hats off to Robert Burns! and to beavers

"Hey brave Johnie lad, cock up your beaver!" Robert Burns
As we move into another month of woolly hat weather (and political gloom and doom) here is a little frivolity.  Admittedly Robert Burns' cheerful song has a political context, as it is thought to have come from an English song ridiculing those Scots who came to London, following James VI when he became King James I of England, or perhaps from a later Scots ballad of Jacobite claims or cross-border rivalry.  Robert Burns' 1792 version of this old song refers to:
"W'e'll over the Border and give them a brush, There's somebody there we'll teach better behaviour, Hey, brave Johnie lad, cock up your beaver!"

In Shakespeare's Hamlet*, the dead king's ghost appeared with his 'beaver' up (Act I, sc.2) but this was the face-guard of his helmet, which could be raised and lowered, (? from the Old French beve).
However, from the sixteenth century onwards, anyone who was wealthy enough wore some sort of beaver fur hat  with brims wide or narrow, worn pinned up (i.e. cocked), or otherwise, according to the dictates of fashion.   Here are some posh Tudor versions, possibly of wool felt or silk, though I think Anthony 2nd Viscount  Montague (centre) and his brothers liked to be ultra fashionable in beaver fur :

The Three Brothers Browne,   miniature by Isaac Oliver 1598   © Burghley House Preservation Trust

This oil painting  shows the changes in headgear across five generations of Sir Thomas More's family.  He, the Lord Chancellor, and his father left, wear the earlier flat cap, while his grandson, Thomas More II, who commissioned this historic family "assemblage", on the right with wife and sons, is wearing the later steeple crowned hat.

The More Family,  Rowland Lockey after Holbein,  c. 1593  © National Portrait Gallery

The Tudor man in the street wore a knitted wool or felted flat cap, compulsory wear on Sundays and holy days from 1571-79, to protect the English wool trades.
Real beaver fur made the very best felt, as its hairs, especially the soft under-hairs, were barbed and bound together well in its manufacture.  It was lightweight, pliable and rainproof.  European nobility depleted the supply of beaver in the late medieval period and had to import pelts from Scandinavia and then Russia.  The very best skins for manufacture were old ones, worn and greasy, the linings from the robes of Russians and then American Indians, for by the 1600s large numbers were imported from Canada;  demand spread and brims grew wider too.

The broad brimmed style was everywhere in the seventeenth century.  Here are two familiar images from Holland.

The Laughing Cavalier   Frans Hals,   1624  © Wallace Collection London

Detail from The Night Watch  Rembrandt van Rijn 1642   © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

A few years later, the Quaker William Penn, on good terms with his monarch, Charles II, according to Quaker precepts, kept his hat on before the King. But then Charles removed his own hat, saying to his friend: "It is the custom in this place that only one man should remain covered at a time."

Contemporary chalk drawing of William Penn,  Francis Place c. 1698  (see Historical Society of Pennsylvania)

Part of the Quaker faith was that all men were equal, and so they would not remove their hats before officials and those of higher social standing, (i.e. hat-honour); they only removed their hats when praying, as before God.  A leading Quaker in Rotterdam, friend and supporter of men like Penn and John Locke, one Benjamin Furly, fell out with his brethren over the hat-wearing rule, and was
ostracised.   He argued strongly, having followed Quaker practice for 30 years, that there were occasions when it might seem right to an individual to doff his hat, and this must be a matter of personal conscience.  "I have to this day forborne to practice the utmost liberty I have in mind, as to the Capital in ceremonious Ceremony". (7 Nov. 1692 to John Locke)

In the early 20th century, the famous Quaker Oats advertising shows a hatted Quaker, supposed to be copied from William Penn's portrait, although it is probably a generic image.

18th century engraving of William Penn, with hat  © National Portrait Gallery London

By the eighteenth century, Englishmen's hats were influenced by French and military styles from the numerous wars on the Continent.  Brims varied in size and could be fastened up in a variety of ways, front, back, sideways or including the tricorne.  Women also wore large brimmed masculine styles whether for hunting ( as in Tudor times) or following fashion's changes.  Gainsborough's portraits  show a wonderful display.

  Peter Muilman, Chas. Crokatt & Wm. Kneale  c. 1750  Thomas Gainsborough © Tate Gallery

In fashionable London,  these young men would have looked for the beaver signboard for where to buy their hats.
Manufacturing with its fumes and pollution took place elsewhere in suburbs like Battersea and Wandsworth:  The beaver fur was stewed in a toxic mix of copper acetate and mercury-laced gum arabic, before it could be processed into felt and moulded into hats.  This is sometimes thought to be the basis of the phrase, "Mad as a Hatter" (think Alice in Wonderland) which came from the USA in the mid nineteenth century.

 Another  American phrase, "Talking through one's Hat" spread in the 1900s, and Lilly Dache, the famous New York milliner to the stars,  used it as the title for her autobiography in  1946.

Dorothy Lamour in a Lilly Dache hat

The cousin who took her in when she arrived from France was a Quaker, and Lilly's short, fringed Parisienne dress did not go down well with Quaker ladies, until Lilly settled in and learnt more about the Society of Friends.  
"Believe me, I have made many hats.  And with each hat is a story… I have seen a hat change the whole course of a life."  And so, from Europe to North America, have beavers.

*Hamlet. A play for our times: a small nation on the edge of Europe -- beset by backstabbing, treachery, conniving, ineptness, wars and madness.

October: John Evelyn - home thoughts from abroad

Friday 1st October 1943

"A taxi motored me to Wotton House where I lunched and spent the afternoon.  Today it belongs to John Evelyn, just as it belonged to the diarist John Evelyn in the seventeenth century.

  Pen drawing of Wotton House, by Evelyn 1640.  © British Library, Evelyn Archive

It is a long rambling, untidy house.  The nucleus of it is Jacobean, and a few rich doorways of that period survive upstairs.  But the present Evelyn's grandfather spoilt the house in every conceivable way in the 1870s. In the hideous Ruskin-style library are many rare books, including some 200 of Evelyn's own; also royal seals, miniatures and nineteenth-century busts.  There are innumerable family portraits , including three of John Evelyn, of which the Kneller is the most remarkable.

John Evelyn, c.1687  by Sir Godfrey Kneller  © The Royal Society 

There is a table carved by Grinling Gibbons, whom Evelyn discovered, and an Italian ebony cabinet* in which Evelyn's manuscript diaries were found.  The army have occupied most of the house during the war.  They allowed a fire to blacken the original door cases, walls and ceiling of the dining-room.  Could Evelyn have called in Wren to design this room?.  The garden, now a wilderness, has a mound cut into terraces by Evelyn, and below it a temple on Doric columns, which he built.  All the trees are magnificent, and the beeches are said to have been planted by him."

Ancestral Voices   James Lees-Milne 

John Evelyn travelled extensively in France and Italy as a young man during the Civil War.  In his Diary he records (exhaustively) all the palaces, gardens, churches and art treasures he saw in France and the great cities of Italy:  visiting Genoa, Pisa, Lucca, Florence, Leghorn, Rome and Naples. Full of interesting insights, describing the people and customs,  he only occasionally mentions the food and weather, unless it affected his progress. He travelled by coach, on horse-back, and felucca (subject to storms) and by horse-drawn barge and boat from Bologna and Ferrara along the Po marshes to embark for Venice.  From Venice he journeyed home via Switzerland (he was ill with smallpox in Geneva) and France, where he married the English ambassador's young daughter, Mary Browne, in June 1647.  He left Paris for Calais at the end of September 1647, where he had first arrived four years before, and reached London late on 2nd October.

John Evelyn in 1648  by Robert Walker  © National Portrait Gallery

Having only just returned myself from Bologna airport, after several long days of amazing sightseeing in the Emilia-Romagna, I was struck by this poem Evelyn wrote in Naples in February 1645, well before his travels were ended.  Was he remembering the tranquil family home and its gardens at Wotton? 

"I left this Ode, …as the Non ultra of my Travells; sufficiently sated with rolling up and downe, and resolving with my selfe to be no longer an Individuum vagum, if ever I got home againe;...

Happy the man who lives content
With his own Home, & Contintent:
Those chiding streames his banks do curb
Esteemes the Ocean to his Orb;
Round which when he a Walke dos take,
Thinks t'have perform'd as much as Drake:
For other tongues he takes no thought
Then what his Nurse or Mother taught:
He's not disturb'd with the Rude Cries
Of the Procaccio's Up & Rise;
But being of his Faire possess'd
From Travelling sets up his rest:
In her soft armes no sooner hurl'd
But he enjoys another World,
Scornes Us who Travell Lands & Seas,
Thinkes there's no countries like to his:
If then at Home, such Joyes be had,
Oh, how un-wise are We, how Mad!"

Diary of  John Evelyn  edited E.S. De Beer

*I wrote about Evelyn's Italian ebony cabinet in an earlier blog (Jan 2016): see  "A Collector's Cabinet"

Sandleford Priory and Lady Montagu's bluestockings: "beauty blended with utility"

"The approach to the house is a fine lawn, with sheep feeding upon it.  This gives you the idea of beauty blended with utility, which always produces agreeable sensations in the mind."  

Memoirs of Mary Morgan 1791, A Tour to Milford Haven pub. 1795.

The Montagu family at Sandleford, Berkshire     Edward Haytley c. 1744

© the Huntington Library collection, San Marino California

These idyllic scenes of Georgian gentry amid pastoral pursuits on their country estates, were just as carefully contrived (by painters and patrons) as Capability Brown's landscapes.  Haymaking was a popular subject, as village women traditionally helped to bring in this all-important harvest, adding colour and interest to the scene.  Here we see Edward Montagu and his wife Elizabeth, married two years earlier, with her sister Sarah Scott, enjoying the prospect from Sandleford Priory south across the river Enborne to Newtown and Beacon Hill.  Haytley has included a telescope in this painting, just as in his picture of the Drake Brockman family at Beachborough House, Kent.

A mezzotint of 1776, after a lost portrait of Lady Montagu by Sir Joshua Reynolds 

© National Portrait Gallery London 

Elizabeth Montagu was left a wealthy widow in 1775 (Montagu's wealth came from Newcastle coal) and began updating the house and gardens.  She employed James Wyatt to link the house and the ancient Priory chapel.  He created a beautiful octagonal drawing-room with antechambers, linking the two buildings;  previously the old chapel had provided spare bedrooms if there was an overflow of guests, such as Hannah More and other members of Lady Montagu's "Bluestockings" circle. Sandleford would be a convenient stopover en route to Bath.

Lady Montagu was called "the Queen of the Bluestockings" by Samuel Johnson, for her literary salons held at Montagu House in Mayfair. Here there was no dancing, cards, or alcohol, but tea and lemonade to refresh the witty and intellectual conversation discussing the arts and ideas (but not scandal or politics) with women equal among men.  Fellow leading bluestockings were Mrs Elizabeth Vesey and Mrs Frances Boscawen, ladies of wealth and education, and guests at their salons included Edmund Burke, Mr and Mrs David Garrick,  Johnson, Fanny Burney and the Thrales, Horace Walpole, Reynolds and many women writers and philanthropists.  Promoting and supporting women's right to education, and to publish their work, was one of their leading concerns.

Capitalizing on their reputations, in this painting Richard Samuel has included Lady Montagu, "Queen of the Bluestockings" seated centre right, with Hannah More behind her, Angelica Kauffman at her easel, and Elizabeth Carter the poet and translator of Epictetus far left behind her.

Portraits in the characters of the Nine Muses in the Temple of Apollo   

Richard Samuel 1778  © National Portrait Gallery

It was Hannah More who wrote the comic "blue-stocking" poem The "Bas Bleu", or Conversation*, in praise of Mrs Vesey, published in 1784, but the name was probably begun by Mrs Vesey apropos of the retiring botanist, Dr. Benjamin Stillingfleet. He could not afford the black or white silk stockings expected for such social occasions, but was told by Mrs Vesey to turn up in his blue worsted hose, (blue being a cheap practical colour popular for servants, tradesmen and charity schoolchildren).
He "rendered himself so entertaining that the ladies used to delay their discussion until his arrival, declaring - 'We can do nothing without our blue stockings' - whence the bas bleu. "

Lady Montagu was herself celebrated in a poem by William Cowper,  in which he describes  her London salons as like a haven for exotic birds:
"The birds put off their feathery hue
To dress a room for Montagu……    

These were large rainbow-coloured woven feather screens "from gaudy peacock to solemn raven" astonishing even in her palatial Portland Square house, and Cowper compares her writers and intellectuals to the rare birds represented:

"All these to Montagu's repair,
Ambitious of a shelter there.
There Genius, Learning, Fancy, Wit,
Their ruffled plumage calm refit,
…
And in her eye, and by her aid
Shine safe without a fear to fade."
On Mrs Montagu's Feather Hangings*  William Cowper

Portman Square from Ackermann's Repository of Arts, c. 1831

The summers at Sandleford were spent in a simpler bucolic mode.  Philanthropic with her wealth in London and in the country,  Lady Montagu revived harvest suppers and entertainments for servants and tenants, and was a generous local benefactor. Yet she remained a lady of rank, enjoying from a distance the labours of others.  She writes to Mrs Vesey in July 1786:

 "I now inhabit [my new dressing room] with great pleasure: each window of the Bow presents a most delightful pastoral scene, which was yesterday rendered more gay by 33 Women and girls singing while they were weeding and picking up stones.   My heart….sympathised in their cheerfulness".

This is also Watership Down country.  One childhood exploration took us along a cart-track past haystacks and between the  fields of corn. Tiptoeing into shady coppices where Solomon's seal grew, it was so utterly silent that a startled wood pigeon  taking off would make us jump with fright.  Eventually we would see Sandleford Priory on the skyline.

 Sandleford Priory and High Wood, near Gorse Covert (Photo Rodolph@Wikimedia)

 It seems appropriate that Elizabeth Montagu's country home at Sandleford, where she supported women's learning, should have become a thriving girls' school.

*Both Hannah More's and Cowper's poems can be enjoyed on poemhunter.com.
For a fascinating study of women's lives, I recommend Behind Closed Doors, at home in Georgian England, by Amanda Vickery.

St Valentine's day: Love and death for the Merry Monarch, Charles II

Pierre Mignard painted this flattering portrait of Louise de Keroualle, Charles II's French Catholic mistress, in 1682 in Paris; some years later he became Louis XIV's first painter.
The distinctive blue sleeves may have been from a studio prop, and the negro child, the coral, nautilus shell, and the pearls all contrast with Louise's pearly skin, and also hint at the "vanitas" of earthly love.

Louise de Keroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth,   Perre Mignard, 1682

© National Portrait Gallery, London

Charles II had many mistresses - or "Valentines",  over the years, most famously English-born Nell Gwyn, and it was her rival Louise de Keroualle she was referring to, in her famous quip "I am the Protestant whore!" during a period of anti-Catholic demonstrations.

There were constant rumours that the King himself was a closet Catholic, and almost certainly died as such on 6th February 1685.   It was to avoid such anti-Catholic disturbances that Charles II was quietly buried between eight and nine at night on St Valentine's Day, 14th February 1685, as John Evelyn recounts:

"the King was [this night] very obscurely buried in a vault under Hen: 7th Chapell in Westminster, without any manner of pomp, and soone forgotten after all this vainity, & the face of the whole Court exceedingly changed into a more solemn and moral behaviour: The new King affecting neither Prophanesse, nor bouffonry:  All the Greate Officers broke their white-Staves on the Grave &c: according to form:"  Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E.S. De Beer

Henry VII's Chapel, © Westminster Abbey

Evelyn's friend, Samuel Pepys, whose Diary tells us so much about Charles II and his Court in the 1660s,  also records Valentine's Day merrymaking, a mixture or romance, sex, and 'bouffonry'.  It was the custom for groups of friends to draw lots for their Valentines for the forthcoming year, and give their ladies gifts. John Locke writes to his Oxford valentine in 1659: "I have an overflow of happiness and honour in being yours though a Lottery made me soe, and you have given no small proofs of an excellent and obliging nature in accepting such a trifle from the hand of fortune. "

You were also expected to take as your Valentine the first person of the opposite sex whom you saw that morning:
"14. St.  Valentine. 
This morning comes betimes Dicke Pen[n] to be my wife's valentine, and came to our bedside.  By the same token I had him brought to my side, thinking to have made him kiss me, but he perceived me and would not. So went to his Valentine -- a notable, stout, witty boy.  I up, about business; and opening the door, there was Bagwell's wife, with whom I talked afterwards and she had the confidence to say she came with a hope to be time enough to be my Valentine, and so endeed she did -- but my oath preserved me from losing any time with her."  Samuel Pepys, Diary 1665

In May 1660, Pepys sailed with Edward Lord Montague to the Hague, part of the  convoy to bring King Charles and his brother James back to England, where Pepys was presented to the King, his brother James, Duke of York and their sister Mary, the Princess Royal.  Before this, Charles and his attendants in exile had been living in penury, " in a sad, poor condition for clothes and money…their clothes not being worth 40s., the best of them".

Here is Charles as Prince of Wales with his siblings in happier times, with on the left in the painting Princess Mary, whose son would reign as William III, and Charles' brother James, still in long skirts, who would succeed Charles as King James II, in February 1685.

The five eldest children of Charles I,  copy after Anthony Van Dyck 1637

© National Portrait Gallery

Libra: the Scales of Justice

"He shall have merely justice, and his bond."

  Charles Macklin in The Merchant of Venice,  Johann Zoffany c. 1768

©  Tate Gallery, London

"Merchant:  Most learned judge! A sentence! come, prepare!
Portia: Tarry a little: there is something else.
This bond doth give thee here no jot of blood;
The words expressly are 'a pound of flesh:'
Then take thy bond, take thou thy pound of flesh;
But, in the cutting it, if thou dost shed
One drop of Christian blood, thy lands and goods
Are, by the laws of Venice, confiscate
Unto the state of Venice."
 The Merchant of Venice, Act IV Sc. 1.  William Shakespeare

Many visitors in the audience at London's Globe Theatre are not that familiar with Shakespeare's plays.  I remember that there was an audible gasp at this point in the court scene as Portia plays her master stroke against Shylock - just as there must have been when the play was first performed around 1599.

Nearly 150 years later, at Drury Lane Theatre in 1741, Charles Macklin created another sensation by playing Shylock as a serious character, not the comic clown figure the eighteenth century had turned him into.

Eighteenth century engraving © National Portrait Gallery

To get in character he researched the London Jews, their dress and accents, to create a believable stage persona, and not the old 'bogeyman' as was then customary.

The dramatic figure of Shylock on this Staffordshire teapot is based on engravings of Macklin in the role (not David Garrick as was once thought).  You can see the scales hanging from his arm, while his fingers are testing the tip of the sharpened knife, just as in this other engraving of the actor below.

Jasper teapot, Neale & Co, Hanley c. 1785

© Fitzwilliam Museum

Engraving after J.H. Ramberg c. 1785  

Macklin, known as "wicked Charlie Macklin", was a tempestuous character; he accidentally killed a fellow actor in a backstage quarrel, and was tried and acquitted of murder. Zoffany's painting above is thought to portray one of the judges on the left.  Macklin had a long successful career, his portrayal of Shylock making his name, and he spoke a few lines at his last stage appearance in 1789.
He was a Libran, born on 26th September, 1697 and died in 1797,  probably not quite the 102 years recorded on his memorial plaque in St Paul's Church, Covent Garden.

John Locke's troublesome portrait

29th August, 1632, is the birthday of philosopher and scholar, John Locke.  He was born in Wrington, near Bristol in this cottage - which looks somewhat decayed in this much later print. This was the childhood home of his mother Agnes Keene, who had come here to be with her mother for the birth.  It has since been pulled down and is now marked by a commemorative plaque set against the churchyard wall nearby.  His father was a country attorney and a few days later mother and child returned to Belluton, near Pensford, which remained Locke's home until he left for Westminster School, followed by Christ Church college, Oxford in 1652.
 In 1665 he was employed as a minor secretary on a diplomatic mission to Cleves near Brandenberg and on his return to England became part of Sir Anthony Ashley-Cooper's household at Exeter House in the Strand, as physician and confidential secretary.

John Locke c. 1672  by John Greenhill

© National Portrait Gallery, London

 Locke was rising forty when this portrait was painted, and Ashley-Cooper, now Lord Shaftesbury, had his portrait painted by Greenhill around the same time.

Sir Anthony Ashley-Cooper c. 1672-3,  after John Greenhill

© National Portrait Gallery London

Three years later Locke's health, always worse in the heavily polluted London air, forced him abroad in November 1675 to winter in Montpellier.  Before he left he made arrangements for his books and other belongings, including a portrait,  to be cared for in Oxford and at Exeter House, not knowing that he would be abroad for over three years.

So, is this the famous portrait of Locke left in safekeeping with his colleague and friend, Shaftesbury's steward Thomas Stringer, along with his books and other effects, over which he and Mr & Mrs Stringer quarrelled when Locke asked for its return some years later?

While Locke was abroad Exeter House  had the builders in in 1676 and then the Shaftesbury family and staff moved to Thanet House in Aldersgate Street and to Wimborne St Giles, the family seat.  Stringer would have been dealing with all these relocations of people and goods, as well as moving to lodgings in St. Martin's Lane himself.

Locke returned to Shaftesbury's service in 1679, but then following Shaftesbury's death in disgrace in 1683,  he also fled to the Netherlands for safety for the next six years.  No wonder there was some confusion over the painting's ownership by 1688 when Locke asked a friend to retrieve it for him*, but this does not entirely explain Thomas Stringer's unfriendly and adamant claim that it had been a gift.
He writes to Locke's go-between, Edward Clarke in March, arguing at length:
 "…wee are now too old for Children's play to have a thing given and then to have it called for againe;"

This sense of umbrage remained between both parties, and the identification of the painting remains uncertain.   

John Greenhill was also a Somerset man, who trained with Peter Lely before setting up his own London studio about the time he painted this showy self portrait.  It was probably intended to attract potential patrons, and he holds Lely's drawing of him like  a reference. 

Self Portrait, c. 1665, aged 20

© Trustees of Dulwich Gallery

By the time he painted Locke,  Greenhill  was an established portrait painter, but was to die young after a fall returning home from a heavy night out, in 1676.  Many of his portraits of Stuart worthies are now in public collections, as are his and other artists' portraits of Locke. 

*Locke wanted an engraving made for the frontispiece to his Essay concerning Human Understanding,   and admitted his vanity in liking this image of his younger self.

"And a few friends, and many books,…" Abraham Cowley

Abraham Cowley,  Sir Peter Lely, 1666-67
© National Portrait Gallery

Highly regarded in the seventeenth century, there are portraits of Cowley in several Oxford and Cambridge Colleges, and he was buried in pomp in Westminster Abbey. His reputation as a poet dwindled in later centuries, but he should also be remembered for his influence amongst those who founded the Royal Society; his Proposition for the Advancement of Learning was published in 1661 and he and his friend John Evelyn shared their interest in botany. 

THE WISH

"Well then! I now do plainly see

This busy world and I shall ne'er agree.

The very honey of all earthly joy

Does of all meats the soonest cloy;

And they, methinks, deserve my pity

Who for it can endure the stings,

The crowd, and buzz, and murmurings,

Of this great hive, the city.

"Ah, yet, ere I descend to the grave,

May I a small house and large garden have;

And a few friends, and many books, both true,

Both wise, and both delightful too!

And since love ne'er will from me flee,

A Mistress moderately fair,

And good as guardian angels are,

Only beloved and loving me.

"O fountains! when in you shall I

Myself eased of unpeaceful thoughts espy?

O fields, O woods!  when, when shall I be made

The happy tenant of your shade?

Here's the spring-head of Pleasure's flood:

Here's wealthy Nature's treasury,

Where all the riches lie that she

Has coin'd and stamp'd for good.

"Pride and ambition here

Only in far-fetch'd metaphors appear;

Here naught but winds can hurtful murmurs scatter,

And naught but Echo flatter.

The gods, when they descended, hither

From heaven did always choose their way:

And therefore may we boldly say

That 'tis the way too thither.

"How happy here should I

And one dear She live, and embracing die!

She who is all the world, and can exclude

In deserts solitude.

I should have then this only fear: 

Lest men, when they my pleasures see,

Should hither throng to live like me,

And so make a city here." 

Abraham Cowley,  1618-1667.  

Cowley was a staunch Royalist, carrying secret letters between Henrietta-Maria from exile in France and Charles I.   Having lived through the political and religious upheaval under Charles I, Cromwell  and Charles II, it is not surprising that Cowley echoes Virgil and Horace in his picture of a quiet rural life (although he never married).  But for the modern reader, Andrew Marvell says it so much better.   

Lady Masham's closet

No portrait survives of Damaris Cudworth, Lady Masham, who was a close friend of Locke since 1681;  she was then living in Cambridge where her father, the Platonist Ralph Cudworth, was Master of Christ's College.

The Master's Lodge, Christ's College, Cambridge (built c. 1550)

© Christ's College Cambridge

This description was written in November 1685, when she was still adjusting to her new life as wife to Sir Francis Masham, stepmother to his children and mistress of a household in rural Essex, and it gives us a vivid sense of her personality.

"I have several times begun to write to You since I received Yours But the Necessitie of Household Affaires will have it so that I could never Yet finish one Letter;...'Tis in vain that you bid me Preserve my Poetry; Household Affaires are the Opium of the Soul… if ever that Humour come on me againe You shall Wish for Finis a Thousand times before you find it; I will set the  Affronted Countrey Ladies too upon you, and They shall Abuse you Ten times more than I can, for All your Contempt of Theire Sublime Ideas of Goose Pye and Bag Puding.  This would bring me again now to the Chapter of Household Affaires, and my imployments, but that I am awearie: However for All my quarrel with you I cannot help  telling you that there is scarse any thing I would not give to see you Here in my Closet where I am now writing to You: I can but think how you would  smile to see Cowley and my Surfeit Waters Jumbled together; with Dr. More and my Gally Potts of Mithridate and Dioscordium; My Receits and Account Books with Antoninus's his Meditations, and Des Cartes Principles; with my Globes and my Spinning Wheel; for just in this order they at present ly, and tis not without Reason I think that I designe to Draw Curtains over this Fantastical Furniture."

From her letter to John Locke, 14 November 1685
The Correspondence of John Locke, ed. E. S. De Beer  Oxford University Press

Engraving of Lady Masham's estate, Oates House, Essex (c. 1821)

(Essex Records Office)

This portrait of Locke was painted in the summer of 1689, soon after his return to England from political exile in Holland. The next year he moved to live with the Mashams at Oates,  a more healthy spot than London, where he became an influential part of the household (although he insisted on paying rent).   So Lady Damaris Masham's correspondence with her friend was replaced with daily conversation.

  John Locke   Herman Verelst,  1689
© National Portrait Gallery

John Locke: sight and insight.

Here are portraits of two very great friends - young William Molyneux, Irish astronomer and natural scientist and John Locke, the famous philosopher and man of letters. They lived in an age of enquiry and  debate - widely spread through the printed word - and shared their  interests and studies in natural philosophy.      You feel that as such close friends, who relied almost entirely on correspondence between Dublin and England, with only the one meeting in August 1698, they would want to be looking at each other.  But here they are, side by side, having sat for these portraits in 1696.

William Molyneux, attribut.  Sir Godfrey Kneller; and John Locke, by Michael Dahl  c. 1696
© National Portrait Gallery

 Locke wrote to Molyneux in May 1697:

"Though the honour you do me in the value you put upon my shadow be a fresh mark of that friendship which is so great an happiness to me, yet I shall never consider my picture in the same house with you, without great regret at my so far distance from you my self.  But I will not continue to importune you with my complaints of that kind; 'tis an advantage greater that I could have hoped, to have the conversation of such a friend, though with the sea between; and the remaining little scantling of my life would be too happy if I had you in my neighbourhood."


Their friendship began in 1692, when Molyneux read Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding.  He praised it for its 'more profound Truths, established on Experience and Observations' in the dedication of his work on optics,  Dioptrica Nova, and sent a copy of this to Locke,  who recognised a kindred spirit.  "For meeting with but few men in the world whose acquaintance I find much reason to covet, I make more than ordinary haste into the familiarity of a rational enquirer after, and lover of truth, whenever I can light on any such.  There are beauties of the mind, as well as of the body, that take and prevail at first sight;…"  Locke wrote in September, and asked Molyneux for his detailed advice in preparing the second edition of his Essay.

The friends finally met, face to face, when William visited Locke at Oates, Essex, in August 1698.   William  died soon after, in October 1698 aged only forty-two.  The leading Irish scientist of his day, his 'globe and cube problem' has yet to be satisfactorily resolved.

Quotations from The Correspondence of John Locke  edited E. S. de Beer, the Clarendon Edition, Oxford University Press

"Accidentally, on purpose"

This useful and expressive phrase goes back several centuries, and is particularly pertinent when faced with entrenched bureaucracy.  Thus, Sylvester Brounower writes to John Locke with news from London in 1697.

John Locke , plumbago drawing by Sylvester Brounower (Locke's amanuensis) c. 1685

© National Portrait Gallery, London

Whitehall April the 24th: 1697   

"Mrs Smithsby…presents her service to you and would be glad to see you [Locke] in Town again, as some in our Office [the Dept of Trade and Plantations] do, she has been served just as we are, for her Petition and the King's reference upon it; and Our Establishment with the King's reference upon it, are both, accidentally, on purpose, lost in the Treasury."

(Mrs Smithsby had petitioned for 12 years' arrears of a pension originally granted to her father and her petition was referred to the Surveyor-General of Crown Lands in July 1696.  See Correspondence footnote.)

The Correspondence of John Locke  ed. E. S. de Beer   © Oxford University Press

The Somerset House Conference

The Somerset House Conference, 1604
from children's exercises in creative writing:

"We all sat round the table on that baking hot September afternoon.  All ten of us, all brothers, and our prim and proper father.  Why we had to sit there in our big heavy coats I don't know.  But our father made us.  Of course he took his off to reveal his cool white and blue silk shirt.  We were there because we had been naughty.  Benjamin and his lot had put graffiti on the new painting in the drawing room.  And on top of that all ten of us had performed our pop group 'Oldies' on Sunday, strictly forbidden.  Dad found out and so we all had to study the Bible in the summer hols, to learn about the Ten Commandments and the sabbath. But I didn't mind because 'Oldies' our pop group had a booking that evening at the local disco."

from A Teachers' Guide to Using Portraits   Susan Morris
Copyright English Heritage

The Somerset House Conference
by  Unknown artist
oil on canvas, 1604     NPG 665
Copyright National Portrait Gallery, London