Elias Ashmole
Elias Ashmole | |
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astrologer and alchemist |
Elias Ashmole
Ashmole was an antiquary with a strong Baconian leaning towards the study of nature.[1] His library reflected his intellectual outlook, including works on English history, law, numismatics, chorography, alchemy, astrology, astronomy and botany. Although he was one of the founding Fellows of the Royal Society, a key institution in the development of experimental science, his interests were antiquarian and mystical as well as scientific. He was an early freemason, although the extent of his involvement and commitment is unclear. Throughout his life he was an avid collector of curiosities and other artefacts. Many of these he acquired from the traveller, botanist and collector John Tradescant the Younger. Ashmole donated most of his collection, his antiquarian library and priceless manuscripts to the University of Oxford to create the Ashmolean Museum.
Solicitor, royalist and freemason
Ashmole was born on 23 May 1617
Ashmole supported the side of
After the surrender of Worcester to the Parliamentary Forces in July 1646, he retired to Cheshire.[3] Passing through Lichfield on his way there, he learnt that his mother had died just three weeks before from the plague.[9] During this period, he was admitted as a freemason. His diary entry for 16 October 1646 reads in part: "I was made a Free Mason at Warrington in Lancashire, with Coll: Henry Mainwaring of Karincham [Kermincham] in Cheshire."[10][11] Although there is only one other mention of masonic activity in his diary he seems to have remained in good standing and well connected with the fraternity as he was still attending meetings in 1682. On 10 March that year he wrote: "About 5 H: P.M. I received a Sumons [sic] to appeare at a Lodge to held the next day, at Masons Hall London." The following day, 11 March 1682, he wrote: "Accordingly, I went ... I was the Senior Fellow among them (it being 35 yeares since I was admitted) ... We all dyned at the halfe Moone Taverne in Cheapeside, at a Noble Dinner prepaired at the charge of the New-accepted Masons."[12] Ashmole's notes are one of the earliest references to Freemasonry known in England,[13] but apart from these entries in his autobiographical notes, there are no further details about Ashmole's involvement.[14]
Wealthy collector
In 1646–47, Ashmole made several simultaneous approaches to rich widows in the hope of securing a good marriage.[15] In 1649, he married Mary, Lady Mainwaring (daughter of Sir William Forster of Aldermaston), a wealthy thrice-widowed woman twenty years his senior;[16] she may have been a relative by marriage of his first wife's family and was the mother of grown children. The marriage took place despite the opposition of the bride's family, and it did not prove to be harmonious: Lady Mainwaring filed suit for separation and alimony but it was dismissed by the courts in 1657. Nevertheless, the marriage provided Ashmole with Mary's first husband's estates centred on Bradfield in Berkshire which left him wealthy enough to pursue his interests, including botany and alchemy, without concern for having to earn a living. He arranged for his friend Wharton to be released from prison and appointed him to manage the estates.[3]
During the 1650s, Ashmole devoted a great deal of energy to the study of alchemy. In 1650, he published
Ashmole met the
Restoration
Ashmole embarked on further catalogues, including one of the Roman coin collection of the Bodleian Library, which he finally completed in 1666 after eight years of work. It may have taken so long because Ashmole's progress was interrupted by the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, when Ashmole's loyalty was richly rewarded with political offices. He was appointed Secretary and Clerk of the Courts of Surinam and Comptroller of the White Office. While these two titles do not seem to have provided either an income or any specific duties,[23] he also became Commissioner and then Comptroller for the Excise in London, and later was made the Accountant-General of the Excise, a position that made him responsible for a large portion of the King's revenue. These latter posts yielded him considerable income as well as considerable power of patronage.[2]
The King commissioned Ashmole to prepare a catalogue of the coins and medals held in the Royal Collection, and appointed him to lead a commission responsible for tracing items from the collection which had been dispersed or sold by the parliamentary regime. Ashmole also appears to have been involved in the organisation of the coronation, or at least set himself up as an expert upon it.[2]
Ashmole became one of the founding Fellows of the Royal Society in 1661, but he was not very active in the society. His most significant appointment was to the College of Arms as Windsor Herald of Arms in Ordinary in June 1660. In this position he devoted himself to the study of the history of the Order of the Garter, which had been a special interest of his since the 1650s, and he proposed a design for the Royal Society's coat of arms.[14]
By 1665, he was collecting information for his
On 1 April 1668, Lady Mainwaring died, and on 3 November the same year Ashmole married Elizabeth Dugdale (1632–1701), the much younger daughter of his friend and fellow herald, the antiquarian Sir William Dugdale. All of Elizabeth's pregnancies ended in stillbirths or miscarriages, and Ashmole remained childless.[25] In 1675, he resigned as Windsor Herald, perhaps because of factional strife within the College of Arms.[2][26] He was offered the post of Garter Principal King of Arms, which traditionally came with a knighthood, but he turned it down in favour of Dugdale.[3]
Ashmole possessed his own
The Restoration led to the re-establishment of the
Ashmolean Museum
In 1669, Ashmole received a Doctorate in Medicine from the University of Oxford. He maintained his links with the University and, in 1677, Ashmole made a gift of the Tradescant Collection, together with material he had collected independently, to the University on the condition that a suitable home be built to house the materials and make them available to the public. Ashmole had already moved into the house adjacent to the Tradescants' property in 1674 and had already removed some items from their house into his. In 1678, in the midst of further legal wrangling over the Tradescant Collection, Hester was found drowned in a garden pond. By early 1679, Ashmole had taken over the lease of the Tradescant property and began merging his and their collections into one.[32] The Ashmolean Museum was completed in 1683, and is considered by some to be the first truly public museum in Europe.[33] According to Anthony Wood, the collection filled twelve wagons when it was transferred to Oxford. It would have been more, but a large part of Ashmole's own collection, destined for the museum, including antiquities, books, manuscripts, prints, and 9,000 coins and medals, was destroyed in a disastrous fire in the Middle Temple on 26 January 1679.[34] As a result of the fire, the proportion of the collection derived from the Tradescants was larger than originally anticipated and in the opinion of Professor Michael Hunter this misfortune has contributed to criticisms that Ashmole took an unfair share of the credit in assembling the collection at the expense of the Tradescants.[2]
In 1678, Ashmole stood as a candidate in a by-election for the Lichfield borough parliamentary constituency caused by the death of one of the two incumbent members. During Ashmole's campaign his cousin, Thomas Smalridge, who was acting as a kind of campaign manager, fell ill and died. Ashmole did not visit the constituency, and, as Ashmole's own horoscope had predicted, he lost the election.[35] He also put himself forward as a candidate in the general election of 1685. Surviving documents indicate that he was the most popular candidate, but after King James II requested he stand down (in an age when monarchs were likely to interfere with parliamentary elections), Ashmole did so. On election day, all the votes cast for Ashmole, instead of being declared invalid, were declared as votes for the King's candidate, and only as a result of this ruse was the candidate favoured by the Court (Richard Leveson) elected.[36]
Ashmole's health began to deteriorate during the 1680s. He continued to hold his excise office throughout the reign of James II and after the
Vittoria Feola, in her monograph Elias Ashmole and the Uses of Antiquity (Paris, 2013), has described Ashmole as an antiquary first and foremost, who understood the value of the New Science, which he promoted through his Museum. Feola, however, has warned that antiquity was Ashmole's greatest passion, as well as his main tool for self-fashioning. Michael Hunter, in his entry on Ashmole for the
Notes and references
- ^ Feola, Vittoria (2005), "Elias Ashmole and the Uses of Antiquity", Index to Theses, Expert Information Ltd, retrieved 25 January 2010 (Password required)
- ^ , retrieved 25 January 2010 (Subscription required)
- ^ a b c d Stephen, Leslie, ed. (1885). . Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 2. London: Smith, Elder & Co.
- ^ Elias Asmole – (1617–1692), Lichfield City Council, archived from the original on 18 February 2008, retrieved 29 February 2008
- ^ Josten, C. H. (editor) (1966). Elias Ashmole (1617–1692). His Autobiographical and Historical Notes, his Correspondence, and Other Contemporary Sources Relating to his Life and Work Oxford: Clarendon Press, vol. I, p. 18
- ^ Josten, vol. I, p. 19
- ^ Elias Ashmole, founder of the Ashmolean Museum, Brasenose College, University of Oxford, retrieved 17 May 2018
- ^ Josten, vol. I, pp. 28–30
- ^ Josten, vol. I, p. 33
- ^ Josten, vol. II, pp. 395–396
- ^ Henry Mainwaring was a cousin of Ashmole's first wife who had fought with the Parliamentary forces (Josten, vol. I, p. 33).
- ^ Josten, vol. IV, pp. 1699–1701
- ^ Michael Hunter calls it the first (see Hunter, 2004), but other sources propose Robert Moray in 1641 as the first Speculative Mason whose name is known (see Westfall, Richard S. (1996–2008), Elias Ashmole, Pietre-Stones Review of Freemasonry, retrieved 29 February 2008).
- ^ a b Beresiner, Yasha (October 2004), "Elias Ashmole: Masonic icon", MQ Magazine (11): 6–11
- ^
- ^ She was the widow of Sir Edward Stafford (d. 1623), John Hamlyn (d. 1633) and Sir Thomas Mainwaring (d. July 1646), recorder of Reading, Berkshire (Josten, vol. I, p. 43).
- ^ Ashmole, Elias (2011), Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum, Seattle: Ouroboros Press
- .
- ^ Feola, Vittoria, English antiquarian medical books of the 1650s, Medical University of Vienna, archived from the original on 14 March 2016, retrieved 25 January 2010 (pdf)
- ^ ISBN 0-9543309-2-7
- ISBN 0-8122-3610-6
- ^ "Heaven on earth", The Economist, 29 June 2006 (Subscription required)
- ^ Josten, vol. I, pp. 137, 153
- ^ Josten, vol. I, pp. 155–156
- ^ Josten, vol. I, pp. 172–173, 219, and 243
- ^ Josten, vol. I, p. 195
- ^ Josten, vol. I, pp. 114–115, 131
- ^ Josten, vol. IV, p. 1742
- De Quincey, Thomas(1886), "Historico-Critical Inquiry into the Origin of the Rosicrucians and the Freemasons", Confessions of an English Opium-eater, London: Walter Scott, p. 207
- ^ Josten, vol. I, pp. 681–682
- ^ Swann, pp. 40–54
- ^ Unlike previous collections assembled by aristocrats, the museum was open to anyone, regardless of rank, who could afford the entrance fee (Swann, pp. 40–54).
- ^ Ashmole's collection had escaped the Great Fire of London in 1666; it was evacuated by barge before the fire reached the Temple precincts, which were, in any case, largely spared from the fire (Josten, vol. I, p. 158).
- ^ Josten, vol. I, pp. 220–225
- ^ Josten, vol. I, p. 268
- ^ Probably live spiders trapped inside nutshells (Josten, vol. IV, p. 1680).
- ^ According to his tombstone and a Treasury warrant, or 19 May according to John Gadbury (Josten, vol. IV, pp. 1889–1890).
- ^ Rare Books and Printed Ephemera, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, archived from the original on 14 April 2008, retrieved 3 March 2008
- ^ Ashmole Manuscripts, Archives Hub, Universities of Manchester and Liverpool, retrieved 3 March 2008
- ^ Feola, Vittoria (23 July 2004), "Elias Ashmole's library", Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing Annual Congress 2004, Institut d'Histoire du Livre, archived from the original on 11 August 2007, retrieved 3 March 2008
- ^ "Elias Ashmole 1617-1692 - Book Owners Online". www.bookowners.online. Retrieved 23 October 2022.
- ^ Josten, vol. I, pp. 300–301
- ^ Samuel Pepys describes in his diary an evening at Lilly's house on 24 October 1660, where Pepys met Ashmole and thought him "a very ingenious gentleman".
- ^ Garnett, Richard (1891, repr. 1973). "Ashmole, Elias (1617–1692)." Dictionary of National Biography (London: Oxford University Press).
Further reading
- Coil, Henry Wilson (1961, repr. 1996). "Ashmole, Elias" Coil's Masonic Encyclopedia, pp. 72–73 (Richmond, VA: Macoy Publ. Co. Inc.)
- Feola, Vittoria (2005), "The recovered library of Elias Ashmole for the Ashmolean Museum in the University of Oxford", Bibliotheca, 1: 259–278
- Feola, Vittoria (2013) [2005] Elias Ashmole and the Uses of Antiquity (Paris: STP Blanchard, 2013).
- Godfrey, Walter; Wagner, Anthony, and London, H. Stanford (1963). The College of Arms, Queen Victoria Street : being the sixteenth and final monograph of the London Survey Committee, (London), (contains a biographical list of officers of arms)
- Hunter, Michael (1983). Elias Ashmole, 1617–1692: The Founder of the Ashmolean Museum and His World. Oxford: Ashmolean Museum.
- Webster, Charles (1970), "Ashmole, Elias", ISBN 0-684-10114-9.
External links
- Works by Elias Ashmole at Project Gutenberg
- Works by or about Elias Ashmole at Internet Archive
- The Correspondence of Elias Ashmole in EMLO
- Ashmolean Museum
- The Royal Society Library and Archives Catalogues includes biographical details of former Fellows