2. Nursing ‘Pretty Monsters’: The Duchess of Beaufort’s Florilegium and Herbarium and the Art of Kickius​

Laird, Mark

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2. Nursing ‘Pretty Monsters’: The Duchess of Beaufort’s Florilegium and Herbarium and the Art of Kickius

Mark Laird

A Natural History of English Gardening: 1650–1800

It has long been known that Mary Somerset (née Capel), duchess of Beaufort (1630–1715), was a pre-eminent collector and patron of horticultural science (pl. 60).For the best survey of the duchess and collecting, see Douglas Chambers, ‘ “Storys of Plants”: The Assembling of Mary Capel Somerset’s Botanical Collection at Badminton’, Journal of the History of Collections, IX/1 (1997), 49–60. An excellent account of the duchess’s legacy through her hortus siccus is given in J. E. Dandy, ed., The Sloane Herbarium (London: Natural History Museum, 1958), 209–15. In the Catalogus plantarum of 1730 she was singled out for her ‘Collection . . . of the tender Exotick Plants’ in ‘those famous Gardens of Badmington [sic...

Author

Mark Laird

PublisherPaul Mellon Centre

Related print edition pages: pp.65-122

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-32112

Chapter subject tags:Beaufort, Mary Somerset, Duchess of, 1630-1715Horticulture--Great Britain--History--17th centuryGardens, English--History--17th centuryGreat Britain--Climatic factors--HistoryBotanical illustration--England--18th centuryGreat Badminton (England)Conservatories--EnglandBotanical specimensArt and natural history--Great Britain--HistorySherard, William, 1659-1728Kickius, Everhardus

2. Nursing ‘Pretty Monsters’: The Duchess of Beaufort’s Florilegium and Herbarium and the Art of Kickius

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Description: Reconstruction as elevaton of one part of the duchess of Beaufort's Badminton...

59. Mark Laird, reconstruction as elevation of one part of the duchess of Beaufort’s Badminton conservatory (with stove refurbished in 1699 and with plants drawn by Kickius, 1703–5 — plants reassembled here as though in ideal unified flowering). The left-hand half is imagined as though emptied for summer of the potted plants to the rear on stands, while the right-hand half is imagined cleared of the tubs and pots flanking the orange trees that were grown in the central border. Pencil, watercolour and crayon, 2014.

This reconstruction is based on a description the duchess gave in a 1699 letter to Hans Sloane. She referred to the 110-foot-long ‘Conservatory’, with a rear wall 18 feet high, as ‘made for all Curiositys’. These included the Asian medicinal Justicia adhatoda (rear left). In the Badminton florilegium, Kickius painted this Malabar nut, along with a fruiting guava (right) that was ‘topped’ to prevent it growing into the roof. Beneath these wall trees, potted exotics were placed in two levels, creating a kind of ‘hedge’. A central border (flanked by 10-foot-wide paths) was full of orange trees, lined with tubs or pots of succulents, citrus and all manner of exotics drawn by Kick in his a-seasonal florilegium.

This plate is dedicated by Mark Laird to the Duke of Beaufort and John and Eileen Harris

It has long been known that Mary Somerset (née Capel), duchess of Beaufort (1630–1715), was a pre-eminent collector and patron of horticultural science (pl. 60).1For the best survey of the duchess and collecting, see Douglas Chambers, ‘ “Storys of Plants”: The Assembling of Mary Capel Somerset’s Botanical Collection at Badminton’, Journal of the History of Collections, IX/1 (1997), 49–60. An excellent account of the duchess’s legacy through her hortus siccus is given in J. E. Dandy, ed., The Sloane Herbarium (London: Natural History Museum, 1958), 209–15. In the Catalogus plantarum of 1730 she was singled out for her ‘Collection . . . of the tender Exotick Plants’ in ‘those famous Gardens of Badmington [sic ]’.2Society of Gardeners, Catalogus Plantarum, Tum Exoticarum tum Domesticarum, quae in Hortis haud procul a Londino Sitis in Venditionem propagantur/A Catalogue of Trees, Shrubs, Plants, and Flowers, both Exotic and Domestic, Which are propagated for Sale, In the Gardens near London. Divided, according to their different Degrees of Hardiness, into particular Books, or Parts . . . (London, 1730), preface, vii. In 1990 Ruth Duthie drew attention to the floricultural supremacy of Beaufort House in Chelsea, the London home of the duke and duchess.3Ruth Duthie, ‘The Planting of Some Seventeenth-century Gardens’, Garden History, XVIII/2 (Autumn 1990), 77–102. More recently, Jennifer Munroe argued that the duchess’s ‘work with plants was impressive and influential’; she was a woman ‘who saw herself as contributing to bodies of knowledge in significant and lasting ways’.4Jennifer Munroe, ‘ “My innocent diversion of gardening”: Mary Somerset’s Plants’, Renaissance Studies, XXV/1 (February 2011), 111–23. By contrast, Molly McClain’s biography Beaufort: The Duke and his Duchess, 1657–1715 (2001) offers only a cursory overview of Lady Beaufort as a gardener. Yet McClain’s insights, along with P. E. Kell’s entry ‘Somerset [née Capel], Mary’ in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, together amount to a significant biographical advance; a complex portrait of the duchess begins to emerge.5Molly McClain, Beaufort: The Duke and his Duchess, 1657–1715 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001). I am indebted to this book in two respects: the first is the exploration of the duchess’s need for physic to aid her depressions; the second is the discussion of the Welsh terrain as ducal territory, which may help explain her interest in Wales as a collecting ground for plants. Above all, the spadework accomplished by Gordon Rowley and Douglas Chambers among horticultural and garden historians has made a study of her life in gardening and natural history possible at long last.6See, for example, Gloria Cottesloe and Doris Hunt, The Duchess of Beaufort’s Flowers (Exeter: Webb & Bower, 1983); and Jean O’Neill, ‘The Stove House and the Duchess’, Country Life (20 January 1983), 142–3. The shortcomings of the Cottesloe and Hunt text (with plant identifications) led Gordon Rowley to write an essay that remains the best scientific study of the Badminton florilegium. See Gordon D. Rowley, ‘The Duchess of Beaufort’s Succulent Plants’, Bradleya, V (1987), 1–16. Cottesloe and Hunt adopted the spelling ‘Kychicus’ (followed by Rowley), but a careful reading of the florilegium title points to ‘Kychious’. This is a corrupted version of the Latin form, Kickius. The first album of the florilegium by Kickius is dated 21 July 1703 to 14 July 1705 and measures in the binding 23 ½ × 17 ½ inches (59.7 × 44.5 cm). The second album, measuring in the binding 20 ⅞ × 15 ¾ inches (53 × 40 cm), was, according to Rowley, ‘apparently brought together at a later date as a convenient means of preserving all those other horticultural studies that had accumulated before and after the main work of Kychicus [sic]’. See again Chambers, ‘ “Storys of Plants” ’, for much background information used in this chapter.

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Description: Mary, Marchioness of Worcester and Later Duchess of Beaufort by Lely, Peter

60. Peter Lely, Mary, Marchioness of Worcester and Later Duchess of Beaufort, circa 1670, oil on canvas, 50 × 40 ½ in. (127 × 102.8 cm) Badminton House. Photograph reproduced with the kind permission of His Grace the Duke of Beaufort

Mary Somerset (née Capel) was the eldest daughter of Arthur Capel, first Baron Capel of Hadham. She married Henry Seymour, Lord Beauchamp, in 1648. Following an early widowhood, she married Henry Somerset in 1657. After he inherited Badminton in 1660, she began ‘physic gardening’. At the time of this portrait, she was using ‘physic’ and horticulture to deal with melancholia. The greatest period of her gardening and amateur botanizing extends from the 1680s (at Chelsea and Badminton, as duchess of Beaufort from 1682 onwards), and it peaked in a second widowhood (1700–15). As a widow, she pressed plant specimens for her twelve-volume hortus siccus. The Badminton florilegium (first album by Everhard Kick, 1703–5) represents her late fulfilment as a virtuosa.

The first album of the Badminton florilegium (1703–5) is without question the most evocative relic of the duchess’s gardening.7What I am calling the ‘Badminton florilegium’ (both albums) is a highly problematic collection of drawings, and, short of new work on Everhard Kick being completed (see note 107), my analysis of the Kickius album is merely a provisional overview. The first attempt at identifying the plants from Kick’s paintings (and from the polynomials with authorities given for each number on each folio) was undertaken in 1912. Canon Ellacombe (presumably Henry Nicholson Ellacombe, 1822–1916, honorary canon of Bristol) appears to have sought the assistance of Sir David Prain (1857–1944), director of Kew from 1905 to 1922, who was especially familiar with Indian plants from his time in Calcutta. He put modern names to pre-Linnaean names. His document is kept at Badminton, Fm Q4/3/12a 1912. When Gordon Rowley worked on the identities of the succulents in the mid-1980s, he had the help of David Hunt, who intended completing the identification of all the plants painted by Kick. After my discussions with Hunt, it became clear that only a provisional update could be undertaken, since a systematic study of the twelve-volume herbarium would need a team of researchers. Dr John Edmondson was kind enough to assist me in that preliminary appraisal, working from the Prain list, the Rowley list and Onno Wijnands’s identifications in The Botany of the Commelins; see note 15. It is the work of Everhard Kick (or Kik), Latinized as Kickius.8The Latinate form Kickius is followed throughout (rather than ‘Kychious’) in discussing what I call the Badminton florilegium (which is without a formal title as such). As indicated above, it consists of two albums. The first album (1703–5) is entirely the work of Kickius. The second (apparently from around 1706 and up to 1714) contains the work of Daniel Frankcom, Henrietta London or ‘Miss London’ (daughter of the gardener and nurseryman George London). The end of that album is given over to the artist of the Lepidoptera folios, whose identity is discussed in Part II of this chapter, and to paintings of the duchess’s auriculas, etc., at Beaufort House. While the Frankcom and London drawings are of little artistic worth (and hence are not reproduced in this book), they do provide important horticultural information, as Gordon Rowley makes clear in his article, ‘The Duchess of Beaufort’s Succulent Plants’. In the past, it has been publicized in discrete ways but never in conjunction with the entire body of the duchess’s archive: the extraordinary twelve folio volumes of her herbarium (the hortus siccus in the Natural History Museum, London) and her miscellaneous papers in the British Library and the Gloucestershire Record Office.9For the idea of the hortus siccus or herbarium, see David Elliston Allen, ‘Walking the Swards: Medical Education and the Rise and Spread of the Botanical Field Class’, in Naturalists and Society: The Culture of Natural History in Britain, 1700–1900 (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2001), 337. The two-album florilegium as a whole is difficult to classify. What, for example, was the rationale for including the odd native plant in a sumptuous work on tender exotics? Why was the under-footman Daniel Frankcom trained by Kickius to paint rather inferior portraits in the second album? And why, at the end of that second album, were paintings dedicated to English butterflies and moths shown in a life cycle with their host plants?

The duchess’s cataloguing of the vegetable world and Lepidoptera goes beyond Edenic re-creation or amateur taxonomic purpose. More than a medicinal register, her herbal and herbarium appear a solace for melancholy.10McClain suggests this interpretation in her biography, Beaufort, 118–19. Like John Evelyn, the duchess gardened in the shadow of storms and sadness, yet the regenerative processes of gardening and collecting took a very different form from those of the virtuoso. While Evelyn remained perennially hopeful in the redemptive power of the garden, the duchess turned to gardening in recurring spells of depression (‘mopishness’ in her day).

As a woman, the duchess was not alone among her gender in finding plants and insects all-consuming. In the Anglo-Dutch era of William and Mary, while the duchess attempted to botanize — collecting in the manner of Agneta Block and Magdalena Poulle in the Dutch Republic — her contemporary Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717) was drawn to the life cycles of nature in the Tropics; Merian has given posterity the truly remarkable Metamorphosis, featuring the insects of Surinam.11The analogy with Maria Sibylla Merian is put forward as an argument on gender in Chambers, ‘ “Storys of Plants” ’, 51. He writes that her ‘interest in the process of growth sets her apart from many of her contemporary male botanists, who were primarily interested in dried specimens and in classification’. The duchess’s interest in dried specimens and classification, however, is equally important; hence the analogous example of Eleanor Glanville, who collected dead Lepidoptera, is explored in this account. Eleanor Glanville (circa 1654–1709) of Somerset, sharing the local scope of the duchess’s collecting, preserved butterflies in the manner of a hortus siccus. Reconstructing the connections the three women had to James Petiver helps to provide one fresh context for the large literature already devoted to Merian and her daughters. Moreover, examined together, their very distinct paths in life point to the importance of women on their own, and, in the case of the duchess, a woman achieving renown on her own in widowhood and old age. Even so, it was her middle years with Henry Somerset (1629–1700), 1st duke of Beaufort from 1682, that set the stage for a late flowering, and hence the 1680s and 1690s are one starting point for this chapter.12Molly McClain, ‘Somerset, Henry, First Duke of Beaufort (1629–1700)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online edition: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/26009 [accessed 30 September 2013].

During the ten years that followed the acquisition of Beaufort House in 1682, the duchess was intensively involved in cultivating florists’ flowers: auriculas, polyanthus and carnations. A memorandum of July 1691 records how they were grown in the London garden. By the early 1690s the duchess’s focus began to shift. The period 1685 to 1715 was the first great age of cultivating tropical shrubs and trees. By 1682 or 1683 a tropical hothouse appears in the design for the Hortus Medicus in Amsterdam. Heating was from subterranean ovens fed with coal or oak billets. John Evelyn had visited Mr Watts’s hypocaust ‘Conservatory’ at Chelsea in 1685; and in 1691 he devised a new method of external heating, as chapter 1 explored.13The background to tropical plant cultivation is discussed in Mark Laird, ‘ “Perpetual Spring” or Tempestuous Fall: The Greenhouse and the Great Storm of 1703 in the Life of John Evelyn and his Contemporaries’, Garden History, XXXIV/2 (Winter 2006), 153–73; and Laird, ‘Greenhouses and Great Storm: John Evelyn on the Workings of God and Man in the Garden’, in A Celebration of John Evelyn: Proceedings of a Conference to Mark the Tercentenary of his Death, ed. Mavis Batey (Sutton: Surrey Gardens Trust, 2007), 98–119. See also Mark Laird, ‘Greenhouse Technologies and Horticulture: The 1st Duchess of Beaufort’s Badminton Florilegium (1703–5) and J. J. Dillenius’s Hortus Elthamensis (1732)’, in Technology and the Garden, ed. Michael G. Lee and Kenneth I. Helphand (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2014), 51–72. Hampton Court had a stove by 1689–90, and the duchess followed suit in 1699. Meanwhile, Anglo-Dutch global trade was fuelling English collecting, much as the Dutch model of glass ‘stoves’ enabled tropical cultivation. It empowered the duchess’s shift to collecting tender exotics during the 1690s. By January 1703 James Petiver could describe the ‘Matchless Stoves’ of Badminton.14Cited in The Sloane Herbarium, ed. Dandy, 210. The ‘Abstract’ to Petiver’s collections (James Petiver, Musei Petiveriani . . . , ‘An Abstract’, 94) is dated 16 January 1703.

Onno Wijnands’s The Botany of the Commelins (1983) provides an indispensable background to the plants of the Hortus Medicus in Amsterdam.15D. O. Wijnands, The Botany of the Commelins: A Taxonomical, Nomenclatural and Historical Account of the Plants Depicted in the Moninckx Atlas and in the Four Books by Jan and Caspar Commelin on the Plants in the Hortus Medicus Amstelodamensis, 1682–1710 (Rotterdam: A. A. Balkema, and Salem, NH: MBS, 1983). Many exotic species were grown in Amsterdam and Leiden before their introduction to England through Badminton. The dowager duchess owned a copy of Johannes Commelin’s Horti medici Amstelodamensis rariorum . . . plantarum of 1697–1701, and her jottings and lists (now in the British Library) and the Kick album make frequent reference to this source. William Sherard (1659–1728) was employed at Badminton as tutor / botanist for a short while, in 1700–02. He came with knowledge of Dutch botany (since he had completed, with ‘characteristic generosity’, D. E. Allen tells us, Paul Hermann’s Paradisus batavus, a catalogue of the plants growing in the Netherlands, for Hermann’s widow).16David E. Allen, ‘Sherard, William (1659–1728)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; online edition: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/25355 [accessed 30 September 2013]; Margaret Riley has added some new findings on William and his brother James Sherard in ‘ “Procurers of Plants and Encouragers of Gardening”: William and James Sherard, and Charles du Bois: Case Studies in Late Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-century Botanical and Horticultural Patronage’, D.phil. thesis, School of Humanities in the University of Buckingham, September 2011. His prior experience as botanical adviser to Sir Arthur Rawdon on the estate at Moira in County Down counted for much too.17See E. C. Nelson, ‘Sir Arthur Rawdon (1662–1695) of Moira: His Life and Letters, Family and Friends, and his Jamaican Plants’, Proceedings and Report of Belfast Natural History and Philosophical Society, x (1977–82; reprinted 1981), 30–52; for a shorter and updated account, see E. Charles Nelson, ‘Moira’s Caribbean Treasures’, in his An Irishman’s Cuttings: Tales of Irish Gardens and Gardeners, Plants and Plant-Hunters (Cork: Collins Press, 2009), 56–9. Moreover, while tutor to the marquess of Tavistock, Sherard toured the botanic gardens of Italy, acquiring a haul of rare books and herbarium specimens, and becoming acquainted with botanists in his continuation of Bauhin’s Pinax of 1623 (a central but aborted goal of his life). Thus Sherard brought the duchess expert knowledge for that short time.18See again Riley, ‘ “Procurers of Plants and Encouragers of Gardening” ’; and Stephen A. Harris, ‘The Plant Collections of Mark Catesby in Oxford’, in The Curious Mister Catesby: A ‘Truly Ingenious’ Naturalist Explores New Worlds, ed. E. Charles Nelson and David J. Elliott (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 2015): ‘When William Sherard died in 1728, his herbarium, which comprised some 12,000 sheets, was the largest and most celebrated in Europe.’ Thereafter, she struggled to replace his on-the-spot expertise, with only Kick as an artist on hand and with her physician, Hans Sloane, acting as botanical adviser from afar.

The year 1703 is a good moment to enter the duchess’s complex world. William Sherard had just left England for a new appointment in Smyrna, though he was still arranging delivery of exotic seeds to Badminton in March that year. By July Kickius had begun the first portraits of the florilegium. The herbarium, which consumed the duchess’s final years — 1699 until her death in January 1715 — was being assembled as a fuller representation of global outreach. It would contain the products of exchange with, among many others, Samuel Doody, William Sherard and George London.

Shortly after the duke’s death in January 1700, it seems that Henry Wise and George London delivered a set of new designs for a parterre and wilderness.19These were published in Mark Laird, ‘Exotic and Botanical Illustration’, chapter 6 in Sir John Vanbrugh and Landscape Architecture in Baroque England, 1690–1730, ed. Christopher Ridgway and Robert Williams (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton, 2000), figs 67–9. They are dated circa 1700 and, according to John Harris, possibly in the hand of Henry Wise rather than George London. Presumably commissioned by the dowager duchess, these may or may not have been wholly or partly implemented. Topographical views dated to circa 1708–10 suggest that another revision to the garden and estate and its buildings was in progress under the new duke of Beaufort, her grandson, who inherited the title because his father had predeceased the 1st duke. Such complex developments in garden design from 1700 to 1708–10 are topics for another study. Yet a critical puzzle to resolve here is the link between the exotic stoves at Badminton and the external environment, which includes the gardens battered by the Great Storm of November 1703. Nothing is clear-cut in the duchess’s story, and work on her circa 394 items contributed to Sloane’s ‘Vegetable Substances’ continues at the Natural History Museum, London, under Victoria Pickering and Charlie Jarvis. Until a comprehensive identification of the plants of the Kick album is undertaken, along with systematic study of all the plants of the hortus siccus and all her lists in the British Library manuscripts, this account can provide only a preliminary and conjectural history of a very significant patron in the realm of flowers and butterflies.

PART I
Beginning at the End: The Great Storm of 1703 and the Duchess’s Sweet Resort from Tribulations

The dowager duchess of Beaufort, Maria Sibylla Merian and Eleanor Glanville were three women variously preoccupied with the natural world. They all lived through the Great Storm of 26–7 November 1703. As the storm connected them, unwittingly, by molecules of turbulent air, so each was independently linked to James Petiver (circa 1665–1718), apothecary, eminent collector and botanist. Removed by geography and gender from Petiver’s doings at the club in the Temple Coffee House in London, these women helped advance natural learning, then emerging as disciplines such as botany and entomology. The story of the duchess of Beaufort is thus equally a story of Everhard Kick (circa 1636–after 1705), Hans Sloane (1660–1753) and William Sherard. Each was at various times privy to her ups and downs with both plants and people.

The air that Eleanor Glanville and Mary Somerset inhaled and exhaled in the West Country would reach Maria Sibylla Merian in a matter of hours, for the Great Storm sped over land and sea to the Netherlands.20For the background described here, see Martin Brayne: The Greatest Storm (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton, 2002), especially 46–52. Richard Hamblyn’s introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of The Storm (2005) remarks on winds over 70 miles an hour and a ‘300-mile-wide swathe of destruction’. It claimed the lives of more than 8,000 people. Hamblyn puts forward the idea that the cyclonic system almost certainly originated in the West Indies or off the coast of Florida. See also Dennis Wheeler, ‘The Great Storm of November 1703: A New Look at the Seamen’s Records’, Weather, LVIII/11 (November 2003), 419–27. By contrast, the birthplace of the storm and its track across the Atlantic are uncertain. The relatively calm centre and rapid, inexorable path over Ireland, Britain, the North Sea and mainland Europe suggest tropical origins.21Wheeler, ‘The Great Storm of November 1703’, 425, suggests that intense polar air recorded as moving southwards over New England probably met tropical air recorded as passing northwards in the mid-Atlantic days before the Great Storm. A westerly and cyclonic character of the month meant that temperatures were the warmest since November 1659, at 7.2°C (44.96°F). Its route thus chartered the waters that Maria Sibylla Merian voyaged from Surinam in the spring of 1701, returning with the natural productions of the tropics that would feature in her masterpiece of 1705.

The eye of the storm followed a lightly curving course from the coasts of Cork and Waterford, across Cardigan Bay and mid-Wales to the north Midlands. Hence the duchess’s Gloucestershire and Eleanor Glanville’s Somerset were hit in the middle of the night, though the aftermath continued into the following afternoon. Around Ilminster, for example, orchards were devastated and ‘almost all our high trees were broken down’. By 4 o’clock in the morning of the 27 November, the low-pressure centre was somewhere over Nottingham. The atmospheric gauge was at approximately 950 millibars and winds reached an estimated 150 knots (or hurricane force by today’s standards).22Ibid., 424. In advance of the storm, the instability of the cold front spawned a tornado or wind-spouts in Berkshire. One was like the ‘Trunk of an Elephant’. Another that occurred at night uprooted a very tall elm, ‘which was found the next Morning standing, but perfectly twisted round’.23Cited in Brayne, Greatest Storm, 113. Later that same day, whirlwinds were observed at Delft in South Holland. Hundreds of unfurled windmills were destroyed either side of the North Sea.

The three women left no paper record of the storm. They were busy on their own with miscellaneous paper works or vellum tallies: plant lists, pictures and pressed specimens. The duchess was struggling to make sense of plants that resembled each other: for example, ‘Auricula ursi Borraginoides’ (Ramonda myconi), which appeared comparable to her beloved ‘Auricula ursi’ (Primula auricula) — the florists’ auriculas (pls 62a and b).

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Description: Ramonda myconi, detail of 51:2 by Kickius, Everhardus

62a. Everhard Kick (Kickius), Badminton florilegium, album one (1703–5), fol. 51, detail of 51:2 Ramonda myconi, watercolour and bodycolour, heightened with gum, over graphite underdrawing, on vellum, 23 × 16 ¾ in. (58.4 × 42.5 cm). Badminton House. Photograph reproduced with the kind permission of His Grace the Duke of Beaufort

The ‘Auricula ursi Borraginoides’ in the Badminton florilegium (above) can be identified as Ramonda myconi. An early association of this Pyrenean plant with other kinds of ‘Auricula ursi’ — notably the Primula auricula of the Alps — came from a superficial vegetative resemblance among diverse species. The specimen of Ramonda myconi in volume I of the duchess’s hortus siccus is pressed with the ‘Auricula ursi’ or true auricula and dated 1708, thereby confirming such long-held associations. These represent, like the pairings of Kickius’s florilegium, a world of resemblances, signatures and emblematic meanings — ‘vulgar errors’ of the past more than John Ray’s forward-looking botany.

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Description: Pressed specimen of Ramonda myconi

62b. Pressed specimen of Ramonda myconi in the Sloane Herbarium, HS 131, fol. 52. © The Natural History Museum, London

It fell to John Evelyn, then in his eighty-third year, to document the cataclysm:

The dismall Effects of the Hurecan & Tempest of Wind, raine & lightning thro all the nation, especial<y> London, many houses demolished, many people killed . . . & as to my owne losse, the subversion of Woods & Timber . . . and Valuable materiall thro my whole Estate, & about my house . . . is most Tragicall: not to be paralleled with any thing hapning in our Age <or> in any history almost . . . [pl. 63]24John Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. Esmond S. de Beer, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), V, 550, entry for 26–7 November 1703.

He was not alone in classifying the storm as unprecedented. Daniel Defoe, for whom 1703 was a year of pillory and prison, took advantage of an ill wind to publish an entire volume in 1704: The Storm: or, A Collection of the most Remarkable Casualties and Disasters Which happen’d in the Late Dreadful Tempest, both by Sea and Land.25Richard Hamblyn’s introduction to the new Penguin Classics edition of Daniel Defoe’s The Storm (London: Penguin Books, 2005), XIV–xxii, provides a useful account of Defoe’s ‘terrible year’ of 1703: the reward of £50 for the fugitive, who had written a satirical pamphlet considered a state ‘misdemeanour’, and his punishments once captured. Hamblyn points out Defoe’s ill luck in not being able to profit from his former brick-and-tile business in the aftermath of the storm. He was able to record that, in London alone, more than one hundred elms had come down in St James’s Park. The milkmaids had pails of milk blown off their heads that morning.26Daniel Defoe, The Storm (London, 1704), 81.

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Description: John Evelyn's family home at Wotton, Surrey by Aubrey, John

63. John Aubrey’s watercolour (1673–92) of John Evelyn’s family home at Wotton, Surrey. The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford (MS Aubrey 4, fol. 95r)

Precisely what timber fell at Badminton in the Great Storm of November 1703 is unknown, but the record of architectural damage points to violent winds across the duchess of Beaufort’s Gloucestershire estate — winds comparable to those at Wotton. Situated in the Tillingbourne Valley in Surrey, Wotton (named after its wooded hills) was John Evelyn’s last residence from 1694 until his death in 1706. In the 1706 edition of Sylva, he wrote of his grandfather’s timber that would have been worth £100,000 around the time of the Great Storm: ‘Since of what was left my Father, (who was a great preserver of Wood), there has been 30000 l. worth of Timber fallen by the Ax, and the fury of the late Hurricane and Storm: Now no more Wotton, stripped and naked, and ashamed almost to own its Name.’

Defoe, using eyewitness reportage to gain scientific authority,27For the importance of Defoe’s journalism as empirical science, and also as an insurance against libel, see Hamblyn’s introduction to The Storm (2005), xxiii–xxiv and xxviii–xxx. still saw God’s autograph in the storm: ‘I cannot doubt but the Atheist’s hard’ned Soul trembl’d a little as well as his House.’28Defoe, The Storm, preface. Above all such ‘Inscrutables of Nature’, wind made God manifest. The vast lakes of North America were clearly ‘a Fund of Tempestuous Matter’.29Ibid., 14. Defoe thought that Florida was the birthplace of this ‘unusual Tempest’. As for the history of storms, this was complicated by the question of terminology. He claimed that such terms as ‘fine Breeze’ or ‘Top-Sail Gale’, ‘Fret of Wind’ or ‘Tempest’ were never so well defined in the past: ‘Just half these Tarpawlin Articles, I presume, would have pass’d in those Days for a Storm.’30Ibid., 22. In short, he was happy to conclude, as Evelyn implied, that ‘such a Tempest never happen’d before’.31Ibid., 24.

The mercury had begun to sink in the barometer on Friday, 26 November. It was so profound that it made Defoe ‘suppose the Tube had been handled and disturb’d by the Children’.32Ibid., 25. The storm then intensified and rushed into Tewksbury in Gloucestershire, where the abbey leads were left ‘strangely ruffled’.33Ibid., 51–5. A man was even blown from a house. A chimneystack collapsed through the roof of the Bishop’s Palace in Wells, pulverizing the mansion below, along with Bishop Kidder and his wife in bed. Henry Head, the vicar of Berkeley, Gloucestershire, was one of those men of letters — principally ‘the Clergy’. He wrote an extensive eyewitness account:

Sir, This Parish is a very large one in the County of Gloucester . . . where William Kingscote Esq; has many Woods; among which was one Grove of very tall Trees, being each near Eighty Foot high; the which he greatly valued for the Tallness and Prospect of them, and therefore resolv’d never to cut them down: But it so happen’d, that Six Hundred of them, with the Compass of Five Acres were wholly blown down; (and suppos’d to be much at the same time) each Tree tearing up the Ground with its Root; so that the Roots of most of the Trees, with the Turf and Earth about them, stood up at least Fifteen or Sixteen Foot high; the lying down of which Trees am amazing sight to all Beholders.34Ibid., 92–3.

The Badminton estate in south Gloucestershire, must have felt the full brunt of the storm. But, unlike Henry Head of Berkeley or William Frith, the churchwarden at Slim-bridge, no reporter-clergyman came forward in the Badminton parishes to pen Defoe a vouchee’s letter. The duchess herself was busy with other communications: writing down lists of seeds from China and Virginia that William Sherard had arranged to be sent to her in March 1703.

Widowed at the age of sixty-nine in January 1700, the duchess was in charge of one of the greatest estates in the land. Using her ‘Infirmary or small green house’ to coax poorly plants to good health (‘by the care of an old woman under her Grace’s direction’),35Sloane’s description of the contents of HS 66 in the Natural History Museum, London. Cited by Dandy, ed., The Sloane Herbarium, 210. she built up a formidable collection of exotics. They were equal to those of Hampton Court. As James Petiver put it, with regard to her final years in Chelsea, she employed such ‘Nursing Care scarce any Plant (tho’ from the most distant Climates) can withstand’.36James Petiver, ‘An Account of divers Rare Plants, lately observed in Several Curious Gardens about London . . .’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, XXVII (1710–11), 392. The account was published on 1 January 1710. Or, as the duchess herself claimed circa 1699, reporting the condition to Dr Hans Sloane: ‘When I get into storys of plants I know not how to get out.’37British Library, Sloane MS 4061, fol. 25v.

The duchess of Beaufort’s long life-story is something of a maze. To follow the main path requires a knack: a way to get in — and a way to get out. With many labyrinthine dead ends, the palisades of her list-obsessive mind present culs-de-sac as well as enfilades. The well-known bird’s-eye views of Badminton by Jan Kip and Leonard Knyff are emblematic (pls 64 and 65). Drawn circa 1700 (just after the 1st duke’s death), they were published in Britannia illustrata in 1707. At first sight, the views from the north and east appear orderly. Yet the overview, as though 1,000 feet up, suggests a daunting terrain (pl. 66). From the web of avenues to the dense cubes of wilderness, Badminton appears an impenetrable space. Indeed, any intrepid historian, gamely orienteering in the park and pleasure grounds, finds another maze at the heart of Badminton. Here was the ‘uneconomically’ laid-out house that rejected the logic of the ‘double-pile’.38See Howard Colvin, ‘Georgian Architects at Badminton’, Country Life (4 April 1968), 800. Around it lay a veritable warren of enclosures that included a ‘Current garden’, a ‘Mellon garden’, a ‘Phisick-garden’, and all kinds of pens for rare fowl, guinea pigs and even ‘tame foxes’. An estate map of the 1680s — with its elaborated key to eighty-one discrete spaces — captures the labyrinthine effect of the house and grounds admirably (pls 67a and b).

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Description: Bird's-eye view of Badminton, Gloucestershire, from the north by Kip,...

64. Jan Kip and Leonard Knyff, Britannia illustrata (1707), pl. 9: bird’s-eye view of Badminton, Gloucestershire, from the north. © Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Rare Book Collection, Washington, DC

At the prestigious front of Britannia illustrata, three views of Badminton follow the royal properties of St James and Windsor. They were drawn shortly after the death of the 1st duke of Beaufort in January 1700, since his widow wrote in a letter of Knyff’s visit to commemorate the magnificence the duke had just left behind. The dowager duchess’s newly refurbished ‘stove’ is almost lost to view in the midst of parterres, wildernesses, bowling green, forecourt and service yards. It can be located just to the left of the pigeon-house or dovecote tower, its north-facing exterior wall planted with espaliers. It may also be located as no. 73 on the estate plan of the 1680s (see pl. 67a).

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Description: Bird's-eye view of Badminton, Gloucestershire, from the east by Kip,...

65. Jan Kip and Leonard Knyff, Britannia illustrata (1707), pl. 10: bird’s-eye view of Badminton, Gloucestershire, from the east. © Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Rare Book Collection, Washington, DC

A second view shows ‘demilunes’ in three directions, which, like the parterres with broderie, reflect Continental influences in garden design in the final quarter of the seventeenth century. As the marquess of Worcester (and Lord President of the Council of Wales from 1672), Henry Somerset had already invested heavily in beautifying the estate of Badminton before becoming 1st duke of Beaufort in 1682, obtaining a licence in 1664 for emparking 900 acres. The radiating avenues of the park were laid out in the 1680s as his ducal prestige increased. Hence the Kip and Knyff views represent, with some idealization, multiple layers that date from four decades of landscaping.

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66. Jan Kip and Leonard Knyff, Britannia illustrata (1707), pl. 11: bird’s-eye view of Badminton, Gloucestershire, from the north. © Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Rare Book Collection, Washington, DC

As though viewing from the clouds, Kip and Knyff projected, from north to south, an idealized vision of an avenue network. It is the quintessence of territorial power: twenty main vistas radiating from the lantern atop the house; twenty-two intersecting vistas from a hillock to the south-east; six or seven from the ‘demilune’ termination of the great deer lawn; and parallel lines of trees flanking the house on the north–south axis. A north avenue — two and half miles from the park’s entrance gate to the house — formed the approach to the great lawn and forecourt. Within the deer park (which contained a hare warren), red, fallow and Virginia deer are emblematic of territorial hunting prowess.

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Description: Badminton The Duke of Beauford his House: the estate plan, detail by Unknown

67a. Detail from ‘Badminton The Duke of Beauford his House’: the estate plan, furnished with the duke’s crest, hence dated 1682 or later in the 1680s, 47 ½ × 22 ½ in. (120.7 × 57.2 cm). Badminton House. Photograph reproduced with kind permission of His Grace the Duke of Beaufort

In contrast to the Kip and Knyff views (but corresponding to the Danckerts painting of circa 1670, see pl. 96), this estate plan itemizes eighty-one rooms, outbuildings and external courts in which the everyday functions of a ducal property took place.

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67b. Detail from ‘Badminton The Duke of Beauford his House’: the estate plan, furnished with the duke’s crest, hence dated 1682 or later in the 1680s, 47 ½ × 22 ½ in. (120.7 × 57.2 cm). Badminton House. Photograph reproduced with kind permission of His Grace the Duke of Beaufort

Of particular interest is the cluster of courts and outbuildings near the ‘Mellon Garden’ (due south of the house and church): the greenhouse (73) with gardener’s house (72) and ‘Phisick-garden’ (81); the ‘Pigeon house’ or dovecote (71) with pheasant, partridge and fowl houses (68–9); the guinea-pig house (74); and a house and enclosure for ‘tame foxes’ (70). Beyond superintending the household, the duchess directed her private operations in and around the greenhouse, where Everhard Kick would paint her plants from 1703 to 1705.

Historians, skirting around the duchess’s convoluted story, have tended to depict the 1st duke of Beaufort’s landscape at Badminton as the quintessence of power: a radiating solar system, or some such dynastic or territorial figuration. This fits the duke’s and duchess’s outer trappings — the ‘princely way of living’ — but not the inner workings of the duchess’s mind.

Back in the 1670s, as avenue planting became fashionable in parkland, the duchess’s husband (then marquess of Worcester) began assembling an expansive landscape. Hendrik Danckerts’s pen-and-wash view of the late 1670s shows the establishment of the main approach avenue from the north before the session of axial tree plantings of the 1680s and 1690s; Danckert’s oil painting from the north, circa 1670 (see pl. 96), confirms that the north–south lines of avenue trees in the Kip and Knyff view were also planted early. As the duke consolidated parishes, his park coalesced as an expression of power. From the lantern atop the house, the avenues formed an ‘asterisk of glades’; and, according to Roger North, ‘Divers of the gentlemen cut their trees and hedges to humour his vistos; and some planted their hills in his lines, for compliment at their own expense.’39Roger North, The Lives of the Right Honourable Francis North, Baron Guilford (London, 1826), I, 272–4. I am indebted to Frances Harris for this reference.

Yet, all this while, the duchess was suffering from bouts of melancholy or depression — a ‘mopishness’, as Lady Chaworth called it.40Cited in McClain, Beaufort, 118. By some accounts, she pulled herself out through plants: exerting power by nurturing as much as by controlling estate matters. A master drawing, probably in the duchess’s hand and apparently from the 1690s, sketches twenty-two avenues radiating from a solar centre (pl. 68).41Sloane MS 4071, 204. See Chambers, ‘ “Storys of Plants” ’, 52. The aspiration was clear enough. Yet when Kip and Knyff came to depict that landscape around 1700, a tangled web of more than sixty avenues criss-crossed the park (see again pl. 66). Countless garden compartments had accreted in seemingly haphazard ways. The duchess’s arrangements at Badminton, just as much as her plant lists and Kick’s paintings, suggest a search for order amid a certain taxonomic as well as psychological chaos.

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Description: A drawing, probably in the duchess of Beaufort's hand by Unknown

68. A drawing, probably in the duchess of Beaufort’s hand and dated to the late 1690s. © The British Library Board (Sloane MS 4071, fol. 204)

This ‘solar-like’ sketch shows twenty-two radiating avenues, each with its own termination. Some of these terminations correspond to the Kip and Knyff view (see pl. 66): Tormarton to the south-west, Alderton (‘steeple’) due east, and Lygrove Lodge to the south-west. Thus the duke and duchess visualized avenues as an extension of the prestige of the ducal house: ‘Divers of the gentlemen cut their trees and hedges to humour his vistos’. By contrast, the dowager duchess’s power centre was the small greenhouse or stove. There she had set up by 1700 a supply system that had botanists, gardeners and plant collectors around the globe sending the plants of the four continents to Badminton.

The centre of the duchess’s own solar system was the greenhouse. After 1699 it functioned as a full-blown ‘stove’. From the post-hurricane record of damage to the tiles of the banqueting house, and from the evidence of repairs to rail and baluster over the great hall and billiard room, Badminton suffered on the frontline of the Great Storm. As gales buffeted the estate that November night, the dowager duchess must have felt her stove-sanctuary threatened. She was on the edge of losing control of Badminton too. On 6 October 1703 the signature of her grandson, the 2nd duke of Beaufort, appears in the ‘Cash Books’. In 1702 he had turned eighteen, and William Sherard was no longer needed as tutor. In this way, the duchess’s Badminton greenhouse may be pictured as a sweet resort in an increasingly troublesome world. Working outwards from the florilegium, then, a little more can be understood about the Badminton topography at large. Kickius was the chief factotum in the duchess’s interior landscape, for she had lost the guiding expertise of William Sherard, who had begun to put names to all her plants.

From 21 July 1703 until 14 July 1705 the duchess employed the Dutch artist Kick on the recommendation of Sloane. During those two years he painted sixty-eight glorious, but often bizarre, folios — typically one, two, three or four (even five) species on each folio in stunning juxtapositions of colour and form, roots and all. It is reasonable to assume that he was in the middle of one such portrait as the storm rushed by overnight. Take Folio 11, for example (pl. 69), which illustrates three plants, though only two have labels. They are labelled ‘Althea luteis Plant.r b5.5’ and ‘Geranium africanum Coriandri folio floribus incarnatis minus Cat. Ley: 280’. The first (centre) can be identified as Hibiscus vitifolius; the second (right) is probably Pelargonium myrrhifolium var. coriandrifolium; while the unidentified third (left) is likely to be a plain weed: the wart or swine cress.

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Description: Badminton florilegium, detail by Kickius, Everhardus

69. Everhard Kick (Kickius), Badminton florilegium, album one (1703–5), fol. 11, watercolour and bodycolour, heightened with gum, over graphite underdrawing, on vellum, 23 × 16 ¾ in. (58.4 × 42.5 cm). Badminton House. Photograph reproduced with the kind permission of His Grace the Duke of Beaufort

This folio depicts, at the centre of a characteristic tripartite composition, the Old World tropical plant Hibiscus vitifolius. To its right is a Pelargonium from the Cape of Good Hope, tentatively identified as P. myrrhifolium var. coriandrifolium. To the left is what is probably the wart cress or swine cress of Brassicaceae (Coronopus squamatus or Lepidium coronopus). Because there is no agreement today on how many genera are in this section of Brassicaceae, the nomenclature of the latter remains confused. A British native found on bare waste ground, wart cress seems to have sprouted as a weed in a plant pot or in soil from the dung heap. This is a chance grouping, then, of three unrelated species that simply ended up growing together in the duchess’s conservatory.

Nothing ruffles these blooms. Only the subliminal roots of Kickius’s art evoke the ‘great Stones entangled among the Roots and Rubbish’42John Evelyn, Silva; or, A Discourse of Forest-Trees (London, 1706). that John Evelyn and Henry Head had both observed in the storm’s aftermath. The steamy interior of the stove was disconnected from the exterior world. Evelyn called that external damage ‘the Fall of the Minotaurs’; he described the ‘ghastly Postures’ of fallen regiments of trees.43Ibid. The full account is as follows: ‘Methinks I still hear, and am sure feel the dismal Groans of our forests, so many thousands of goodly Oaks subverted by that late dreadful Hurricane, prostrating the trees, and crushing all that grew under them, lying in ghastly Postures, like whole Regiments fallen in Battle, by the Sword of the Conqueror: such was the Prospect of many Miles in several Places, resembling that of Mount Taurus, so naturally described by the Poet speaking of the Fall of the Minotaurs slain by Theseus.’ Late November meant that all potted exotics were housed (see pl. 59). In the stove, the roots of guava and aloe inched down and outwards to catch the warmth that came from the subterranean embers. In limbec and still-house skillets, domestic servants were distilling household preserves, cordials and liqueurs.44Roger North’s account of the household is invaluable in reconstructing the domestic economy of the estate, with its ‘200 persons’, and as represented in the estate plan of the late 1680s. See North, The Lives, 273: ‘The table were properly assigned; as, for example, the chief steward with the gentlemen and pages; . . . the clerk of the kitchen with the bakers, brewers, &c. all together; and other more inferior people, under these, in places apart: The women had their dining-room also, and were distributed in like manner.
The method of governing this great family was admirable and easy, and such as might have been a pattern for any management whatever. For if the duke and duchess (who concerned herself much more than he did; for every day of her life, in the morning, she took her tour, and visited every office about the house, and so was her own superintendent) observed any thing amiss or suspicious, as a servant riding out, or the like, nothing was said to that servant; but his immediate superior, or one of the high order.’ Everything was made in the house: soap and candles, malt, and ‘all the drink, that came to the duke’s table, was of malt sun-dried upon the leads of his house’ (274). Bellows roused the sluggish fires of bakehouse, brew house, dairy and laundry (pl. 70). Inside the great house, servants stoked the fireplaces. Tucked into a warm bed, or immured in a draughty room, the duchess waited out the tempest like countless other souls. Personal squalls were troubling the well-regulated Badminton, which the dowager duchess continued manfully to superintend.

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70. Detail from ‘Badminton The Duke of Beauford his House’: the estate plan, furnished with the duke’s crest, hence dated 1682 or later in the 1680s, 47 ½ × 22 ½ in. (120.7 × 57.2 cm). Badminton House. Photograph reproduced with the kind permission of His Grace the Duke of Beaufort

This detail shows the forecourt to the north as plain grass (just as in Danckerts’s painting of circa 1670, see pl. 96, rather than graced by the fountains of Kip and Knyff’s idealized view of circa 1700, see pl. 64). Danckerts’s view also confirms the sequence of outbuildings on this plan — laundry (45), dairy (46), brew house (47), bakehouse (48) — and most are still visible in the later paintings of circa 1708–10 (see pl. 95). In short, Badminton, as the duchess knew it, is conveyed by more than just the ideal views of Kip and Knyff.

Beginning at the Beginning: The Duchess’s Spring Floriculture at Beaufort House in the 1680s and 1690s

Mary Capel was born into a family renowned for its horticultural achievements. She was the eldest daughter of Arthur Capel, Baron Hadham, whose Italianate garden at Little Hadham forms the backdrop to the royalist portrait of the family by Cornelius Johnson (pl. 71). Her sister Elizabeth, later countess of Carnarvon, would excel in flower painting, while her two brothers, Arthur and Henry, would build up the gardens of Cassiobury and Kew, respectively. It is likely that an interest in medicinal plants had brought the duchess to gardening by the 1660s.45See again Chambers, ‘ “Storys of Plants” ’, 49. After the duke’s acquisition of Chelsea House (Beaufort House) in London in 1682,46For the background to this, see Duthie, ‘The Planting of Some Seventeenth-century Gardens’, 88. she became active in the cultivation of florists’ flowers — auriculas, polyanthus and carnations — and arranged to have several memoranda itemizing the plants grown there sent to Badminton. One memo is dated 21 July 1691; others are dated 1692 and 1693.47Sloane MS 4071, fols 95–8; and Sloane MS 4071, fols 87–93. A transcription is provided in Duthie, ‘The Planting of Some Seventeenth-century Gardens’, 88–92. They can be matched to the Kip and Knyff bird’s-eye view of Beaufort House (pl. 72). Many of the flowers painted by Kickius’s talentless pupil, Daniel Frankcom, came from the Chelsea garden. Some show early stages in the development of the gold-laced forms of polyanthus that would become popular in the eighteenth century. Similarly, folio 32 in the Kickius album depicts a striped-leaved auricula (‘Strip’d Auricula’s’, Primula auricula cv., pl. 74a) and a polyanthus (‘Polyanthe’s’, Primula × polyantha, pl. 74b).48Fol. 68 of the Kickius album places two old varieties of polyanthus (Primula × polyantha or P. × variabilis) alongside the Caribbean sea grape (Coccoloba uvifera). From the evidence of the duchess’s herbarium, the auriculas were amongst the first to carry true cultivar names such as ‘Oram’s Glory’ and ‘Oram’s Duke of Beaufort’. A ‘Duke of Beaufort’ (whether Oram’s or a later cultivar) was still being grown when Robert Furber brought out his Twelve Months of Flowers in 1730.49Duthie, ‘The Planting of Some Seventeenth-century Gardens’, 95. ‘Oram’s Countess of Coventry’ commemorated the duchess’s daughter, Anne (1673–1763), countess of Coventry from circa 1700, and later, during her widowhood of fifty-three years, a religious writer and friend of Richard Jago.

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Description: The Capel Family, detail by Janssen van Ceulen, Cornelius

71. Cornelius Johnson, Arthur, 1st Baron Capel and his Family, circa 1640, detail, oil on canvas, 63 × 102 in. (160 × 259.1 cm). © National Portrait Gallery, London (NPG 4759)

Hadham Hall in Hertfordshire — inherited by Arthur Capel in 1632, before becoming Lord Capel in 1641 — is where Mary Capel, later duchess of Beaufort, grew up. The garden in the background (associated perhaps with Isaac de Caus and Wilton) may be compared to the great parterre at Badminton as shown in both Danckerts’s painting of circa 1670 (see pl. 96) and the estate plan of the 1680s (see pls 67a and 70). In this painting, Mary, aged about eleven, stands next to her younger sister Elizabeth, later countess of Carnarvon, who would become a talented amateur flower painter.

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Description: Bird's-eye view of Beaufort House, Chelsea by Kip, Johannes;Knijff, Leendert

72. Jan Kip and Leonard Knyff, Britannia illustrata (1707), pl. 13: bird’s-eye view of Beaufort House, Chelsea. © Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Rare Book Collection, Washington, DC

The duke of Beaufort acquired Chelsea House, later Beaufort House, in 1682. Once the property of Sir Thomas More and the marquess of Winchester, it was remodelled extensively to suit the new ducal status of the 1680s. The inner court with carriage sweep was decorated with topiary, while to the rear was a bowling green and grass circle — known as the ‘great grass walk’. The duchess’s Parlour Garden lay to the east, viewed from a raised terrace terminated by a banqueting house. It contained carnations (facing south and west) and auriculas (facing north). The emphasis was on gardening with florists’ flowers rather than on the hot-house exotic cultivation developing at Badminton.

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Description: Badminton florilegium, detail of Primula auricula, possibly cv. Duchess of Beaufort...

74a. Everhard Kick (Kickius), Badminton florilegium, album one (1703–5), fol. 32, detail of Primula auricula, possibly cv. ‘Duchess of Beaufort’, watercolour and bodycolour, heightened with gum, over graphite underdrawing, on vellum, 23 × 16 ¾ in. (58.4 × 42.5 cm). Badminton House. Photograph reproduced with the kind permission of His Grace the Duke of Beaufort

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Description: Badminton florilegium, detail of Primula × polyantha by Kickius, Everhardus

74b. Everhard Kick (Kickius), Badminton florilegium, album one (1703–5), fol. 32, detail of Primula × polyantha, watercolour and bodycolour, heightened with gum, over graphite underdrawing, on vellum, 23 × 16 ¾ in. (58.4 × 42.5 cm). Badminton House. Photograph reproduced with the kind permission of His Grace the Duke of Beaufort

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Description: Corolla of Duchess of Beaufort auricula

74c. Sloane Herbarium, HS 138, fol. 10, corolla of ‘Duchess of Beaufort’ auricula, 1711. © The Natural History Museum, London

A single auricula bloom, similar to the cultivar depicted by Kickius, is preserved in the duchess’s hortus siccus. Given the striping on corolla and foliage, the painted auricula cv. seems virus-infested (like the tulips of the Dutch Tulipomania). The polyanthus is also peculiar with its leafy calyx. The herbarium (where sixty of the duchess’s auriculas are preserved) shows, in complement to Kick’s paintings, how much she favoured florists’ flowers such as Primula auricula and Primula × polyantha. The letter ‘O’ on the outside of the folders relates to her gardener from 1694, William Oram. He had many cultivars named after him and in association with the Beaufort family, including ‘Oram’s Countess of Coventry’ (named after the duchess’s daughter, Anne).

Six possible locations for ‘Oram’s Duke of Beaufort’ are itemized in the account of 1691. Those spots can be identified on the Kip and Knyff engraving. They include the Great Garden, the Warren (north of the stables) and the four grass plats of the Parlour Garden (east of the inner garden forecourt). Auriculas — dozens of auriculas — were thus repeated motifs within a template of beds, wall borders and pots.50Auriculas were among the plants to which individual ‘short beds’ were dedicated. Four each were planted with auriculas and hepaticas; one each with tulips, bachelor’s buttons and lily of the valley. Seven of the twenty ‘short beds’ were planted with ‘gentian-ella’ (probably Gentiana acaulis). Alongside these were two mixed beds of auriculas, daffodils, hepaticas and snowdrops. (The Kip engraving shows only eight such beds instead of ten, but the record of 1691 clearly indicates ten by two.) They were partially shaded by the wall of the terrace overlook. Beaufort House was above all a florist’s garden, where the seasonal rites of floriculture were played out each year from the spring auricula to the summer carnation or ‘July-flower’.

Though the duchess was elevated above the competitive realm of florists’ meetings, her gardeners — first John Mansfield (1682–94), then William Oram (from 1694) — doubtless belonged to the Society of Florists. The Society met in London from at least 1679.51Ruth E. Duthie, ‘English Florists’ Societies and Feasts in the Seventeenth and First Half of the Eighteenth Centuries’, Garden History, X/1 (Spring 1982), 22. Urban tradesmen and urbane professionals were the backbone of such societies. By the end of the century, a Thomas Rench (then his son Nathaniel) held regular gatherings in the London area. Silver spoons and ladles were awarded for the ‘best in show’. The annual ‘Carnation-Feast’ in late July to mid-August became the highlight of the provincial circuit.52Ibid., 25. On one occasion, a member served a ‘Dish of Garden Beans with Bacon’ in lieu of a flower. But more routinely, meeting at an inn, members could enjoy a ‘good ordinary’ after the presentation of flowers and prizes. The Spalding Gentlemen’s Society, founded in 1710, provides the most complete records of learned efforts to collect and show butterflies and florists’ flowers. Each meeting began with a ‘dish’ of tea or coffee and moved to a ‘tankard of ale’ by evening. Tobacco, a chamber pot, and a Latin dictionary and Greek lexicon were provided.53Ibid., 33–4.

The duchess had her own festivities at Chelsea, including state banquets. It seems that she warmed only gradually to the 15-acre estate that Henry had purchased from the countess of Bristol for £5,000. He spent another £5,180 on improvements (including carvings by Grinling Gibbons in 1683–4, which are now housed at Badminton). When Charles II and Prince George of Denmark came to dine in February 1684 (that bitter winter in Evelyn’s gardening), the entertainment was described as ‘very magnificent, such as became so great a peer’.54McClain, Beaufort, 104. See also p. 200 for the account of the wedding anniversary celebration. A banquet house terminated the terrace, which was apparently lined with slightly tender bays (Laurus nobilis). Here was the place to enjoy the meats and sweetmeats of festive occasions. The duchess made a point of celebrating each nuptial. A pyramid of twenty-eight venison pasties for her twenty-eighth wedding anniversary, 17 August 1685, might well have been adorned with carnations.

A gravel walk to the immediate north of the terrace was conducive to winter and spring walks. As each bloom could be monitored close-up, it was the equivalent of turning the pages of a florilegium in a season-by-season arrangement. A first flower of the season was the snow-drop. Hence Alexander Marshal’s florilegium (see chapter 1), which was completed as the duchess took up gardening at Beaufort House, places the snowdrop on folio 4, at the outset of his work (pl. 73). In effect, on folios 2–4, Marshal showed how the winter orangery gave way in January or February to the first outdoor blooms: winter aconite, hepatica, crocus and snowdrop. Thereafter polyanthus and auriculas would bloom in sequence. Spring, in other words, was Primula time at Beaufort House.55The north-facing border beneath the terrace wall was planted with polyanthus (and possibly primroses, hepaticas and snowdrops). The east-facing wall border of the Great Garden also contained polyanthus. Indeed, polyanthus, primroses and auriculas were planted repeatedly in the shade of north-facing or east-facing walls, for example, in the Parlour Garden. Auriculas also lined three out of four grass plats in the Parlour Garden. In the Warren, it was primroses and polyanthus along the north-facing wall, with primroses against the west-facing wall. They were in bloom just as the asparagus beds were tipped with green shoots. The endless multiplicity of forms of Primula vulgaris, Primula auricula, Primula × pubescens and Primula × polyantha are represented in the exquisite spring section of Marshal’s seasonal florilegium (pls 75 and 76).56It should be noted that not everything conforms to a seasonal sequencing. For example, on fol. 102 the double marsh marigold (Caltha palustris ‘Plena’) of spring is the odd one out, since the Hedysarum coronarium and Saxifraga umbrosa belong correctly in the summer garden.

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Description: Snowdrop, Mezereon, Hyacinth, Margined Box, Spring Snowflake, Spring Squill and...

73. Alexander Marshal, detail from fol. 4 (RL 24271) of his florilegium, 1650s–1682, watercolour on paper, approx. 18 ⅛ × 13 ⅛ in. (approx. 46 × 33.3 cm). Royal Library, Windsor Castle. Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2013

The native snowdrop (Galanthus nivalis) is shown next to Daphne mezereum, which flowers very early in the season. Although recorded in the wild in 1759, D. mezereum had been cultivated outdoors from foreign stock some time before 1596. The gilded box (Buxus sempervirens ‘Marginata’), known to Parkinson by 1629, was used to set off these late winter / early spring blooms. Marshal’s folio thus brings to life the compartments of the Beaufort House garden shown in the Kip and Knyff view of circa 1700 (pl. 72).

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Description: Auriculas (Primula x pubescens) by Marshal, Alexander

75. Alexander Marshal, fol. 14 (RL 24281) of his florilegium, 1650s–1682, watercolour on paper, approx. 18 ⅛ × 13 ⅛ in. (approx. 46 × 33.3 cm), illustrating fourteen types of auricula (Primula × pubescens Jacq.). Royal Library, Windsor Castle. Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2013

Among the dazzling array of showy auriculas, the top left-hand one has an unusual double, striped flower. The Revd Samuel Gilbert, when describing two double, striped auriculas in 1682, called them ‘the two choicest varieties in Flora’s Cabinet’. The duchess had a particular interest in striped flowers and plants. In some cases the striping on petals came from a virus that infected tulips, and it resulted in the prized varieties of Tulipomania. Marshal skilfully conveys the realm of the competitive florist, as well as the duchess’s refined gardening at Chelsea, where each spring was Primula time.

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Description: Florilegium, fol. 25, detail by Marshal, Alexander

76. Alexander Marshal, detail from fol. 25 (RL 24292) of his florilegium, 1650s–1682, watercolour on paper, approx. 18 ⅛ × 13 ⅛ in. (approx. 46 × 33.3 cm). Royal Library, Windsor Castle. Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2013

The central flower is an abnormal double Anemone pavonina. To its left is a double form of the native primrose, Primula vulgaris f. plena. To its right is a flower that has been identified variously: either as a hybrid between the primrose and the cowslip, Primula × polyantha — the polyanthus so favoured by the duchess at Beaufort House — or as Primula vulgaris subsp. sibthorpii. Such different types of Primula, flowering at Chelsea each spring, were considered the ‘flowers of distinction’ or the ‘choicest’ in floriculture.

Lacking a stove at Chelsea, the duchess found exoticism in the vast numbers of florists’ flowers — 5,000 carnation layers, for example, in the kitchen garden (pl. 77).57It remains to be clarified whether a greenhouse was ever constructed at Beaufort House according to the estimate sent in April 1689 by Matthew Baker at Hampton Court to John Bale. The cost was just over £178. The Kip and Knyff view does not appear to show any such structure. I am grateful to Jan Woudstra for drawing my attention to the estimate: Sloane MS 4062, fol. 231. By 1693 the gardener John Mansfield was displaying them and other curiosities in some 616 pots. Although fifty-four seedling oranges are listed in one record, this was not primarily an orange garden. Instead, the pots were filled with hardy striped evergreens such as Phillyrea. Other ever-greens (Viburnum tinus, Juniperus communis, Cedrus libani and Myrtus communis) were likewise potted. Some were clipped. Colour and scent came in many guises. For example, there were six pots of nasturtium (Tropaeolum majus) in 1691. They were displayed in the ‘West Walk’ near the kitchen garden among pots of scarlet, mauve, white, red and pink flowers such as dittany.58In 1691 there were fifteen pots of Campanula persicifolia, twenty pots of Lobelia cardinalis and a single pot each of Lonicera sempervirens and Syringa × persica. This exotic horticulture largely followed seasonal rhythms; the ‘hot beds’ — a form of small ‘hothouse’ required for nasturtiums — merely enhanced the effects. Otherwise, the Beaufort House garden of 1691 was still dominated by the products of domestic flower-craft: the improved versions of European and Near Eastern species such as the alpine auricula and Dianthus caryophyllus (the carnation or ‘July-flower’, pl. 77, which had been cultivated in Spain since 1460). While auriculas loved the shade of a north border, carnations were given the warm south- and west-facing borders of the Beaufort House garden (see pl. 72, with reference to the Parlour Garden). Marshalled this way, it was all very orderly.

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Description: Florilegium, fol. 122 by Marshal, Alexander

77. Alexander Marshal, fol. 122 (RL 24389) of his florilegium, 1650s–1682, watercolour on paper, approx. 18 ⅛ × 13 ⅛ in. (approx. 46 × 33.3 cm), showing three types of carnation (Dianthus caryophyllus L.). Royal Library, Windsor Castle. Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2013

At the top is a carnation known as ‘The Nonpareille’ or ‘Catuse’. Below it, and to the left, is the variety ‘Triumphante’, while to its right is the ‘Princesse’, perhaps comparable to the highly esteemed ‘Belle Princesse’ listed by Thomas Hanmer in 1659. Carnations were ‘flowers of distinction’ for English florists’ summer displays. In 1691, 5,000 carnation layers were documented in the duchess’s Chelsea kitchen garden, ready for potted display.

Collecting Tender Exotics in the 1690s: Hot Beds and the Origins of the Badminton Stove

By 1695, however, things had changed at Chelsea under a new gardener, William Oram. He wrote to George Adams — ‘brother’ gardener at Badminton — to show how assiduous he was in collecting new exotics. For example, he listed one ‘Angelica tree with prickles’ for the large sum of 15s. This was Aralia spinosa, probably first introduced in 1688 by John Banister in Virginia to Bishop Compton’s garden at Fulham. The American Benjamin tree (Lindera benzoin) was also on the list. Without doubt this had come to Fulham in Banister’s first consignment of 1683. In 1695 they were still novel enough for William Oram to describe them (in his stumbling, colloquial way):

. . . they are of ye newest and most Admiared plants that are about London . . . for ther is not a Garden wt In : 10 : miles of London wherther for ther is Colexsions of plants but I have be[e]n in and they are such ase I doe Below & hire Grace may want them for I thought fitt since I ame not to know what is wanting to Give hire Grace first of ye Catholouge of The plants with the prices of them.59Sloane MS 4071, fol. 242.

His catalogue listed thirty-four plants, including some curious evergreens.

Apart from Bishop Compton’s Fulham Palace, the gardens of distinction in and around the city included the apothecaries’ garden at Chelsea (Chelsea Physic Garden), George London’s nursery at Brompton Park and the royal gardens at Hampton Court. The duchess’s gardener recorded plants seen at the Brompton nursery and at Chelsea Physic Garden; he made up a shopping list. Species included some recent American imports.60Sloane MS 4071, fol. 309. In addition to the ‘Angelica tree’ and ‘Benjamin Tree’, the list featured ‘the Tulip bearing bay’ (probably Magnolia virginiana, pl. 78). Once again the American link through Compton and Banister was crucial. Contacts extended to private gardens of family members, too, notably the duchess’s brother’s Kew. Mary recorded in April 1693, for example: ‘Catalogue of seeds from the East Indies sent by my Brother Harry’.61Sloane MS 3343, fol. 219v. Gresham College, academic home to many of the Royal Society’s activities, appears to have supplied seeds as well, for the duchess commented in one letter to Sloane: ‘I must not forget to thanke you for the transactions wch I have constantly receav’d the paper enclos’d is what seeds of the colledge ones that are yet come up.’62Letter from Badminton, dated 10 July (probably in the late 1690s), Sloane MS 4061, fol. 26.

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Description: Magnolia virginiana by Banister, John

78. John Banister, Magnolia virginiana, circa 1688, graphite drawing. © The British Library Board (Sloane MS 4002, fol. 90)

The duchess’s gardener at Badminton, George Adams, received a communication from William Oram, who had replaced John Mansfield as gardener at Beaufort House in 1694. Oram noted that he was seeking out the ‘most Admiared plants’ in London, and attached a catalogue with prices including the ‘Tulip bearing bay’ — probably Magnolia virginiana, which John Banister had sent to England from Virginia. This was listed among thirty-four plants. Because, by 1690, the duchess had already received instructions from George London on how to grow this plant, which was the first Magnolia introduced to England, she might well have grown it at Badminton prior to the Oram communication of 1695.

Samuel Doody of Chelsea Physic Garden was an early contact. In the same season that the Beaufort House memorandum of July 1691 was written, the references begin: April 1691, ‘Roots and plants sent by Mr Doody’.63Sloane MS 3343, fols 10r–17v. A further record of these confirms their cultivation: ‘Dr Doodys plants and seeds that grew att Badminton with a description of each 1691’.64Sloane MS 3343, fols 154v–156v and 172. This is elaborated twice again: ‘Roots and Seeds sent by Dr Doody to Badminton in the spring 1691’ (fols 190–191v); and in a fair copy ‘Roots and Plants sent by Mr Doody Apr: 1691’ (fol. 282) Since these were from Barbados, Tobago, Surinam and Africa, it may be assumed that some kind of tropical house was already on the duchess’s mind.

The Chelsea ‘Conservatory’ might have prompted the duchess to turn her attention to tropical plants at Badminton. She noted: ‘Mr Watts Stoves — the weather glasse on the hottest stove was in march betwixt 8: and 9 — the weather glasse in the other stove between 6 and 7 which they say is as hott as June’.65Sloane MS 3343, fol. 154. This slightly odd note on temperatures is undated, but 1689–91 seems plausible as a rough dating (i.e., a few years later than Evelyn’s visit).66It was preceded by an entry — ‘1689 West India seeds given mee by Mris Chamberlain figured’ (Sloane MS 3343, fol. 152) — and followed by a record of Doody seeds of April 1691. Shortly thereafter, the duchess turned to Hampton Court to understand how glass construction could complement the underground stoves of Chelsea. A full account of ‘measures of the stoves att Hampton Court taken by Mr Bale’ survives as a report. It was delivered to her by a servant, John Bale, at her Chelsea home in September 1692 (as is discussed in detail below).67Sloane MS 4062, fols 246–7.

In September 1693 the duchess recorded a range of tropical and temperate plants (some two- to three-year-old specimens) that grew in her ‘stove and hot bed’: cotton, musk mallow, aloes, types of ‘Ricinus’, and even the English maidenhair fern.68Sloane MS 4070, fols 25–6. But this ‘stove’ was clearly not the same as Queen Mary’s glasshouse. One plant that the duchess obtained from Samuel Doody — the Barbados lily (Hippeastrum striatum) — illustrates what was possible with such a ‘hot bed’, and it shows the duchess’s great capacity for detailed observation:

the description of the great Barbado Lylly given mee by Mr Doody 1691 the roote much larger then any tulip root, the leaves have continued winter and sumer from Aprill 1691: April 1693 being put into a hott bed it soone shot up a stalk for a flower and bore too flowers (upon one stalk) the later end of June the flowers are a delicate light Scarlet the midle of each leafe of them a pure white, the chines are a blush colour wth yellow seeds, the stalk was very large, 2 foot 3 inchs high, 2 inchs on[e] quarter in the compas, serverall of the leaves are 2 foot one inch long, one of the lesser Lyllys roots blew the same flower.69Sloane MS 4071, fol. 139.

From 1695 to 1697 the duchess was receiving further shipments of West Indian seeds and plants from George London.70Sloane MS 3343, fols 65–6, 183, 249–50. By 1698 she had recorded sixteen ‘Barbados Lyllys’ growing with two of ‘Mr Londons great Lyllys’ in pots. These were presumably in her ‘stoves’ (whether glass cases or hot beds) at Badminton.71Sloane MS 3343, fols 77–8.

The earliest West Indian seeds of 1689 included the easily identified star apple, sour sop and tamarind. By 1690, however, the question of names was proving troublesome. The duchess wanted plants from Barbados, where James Reed was collecting for Hampton Court. Yet, as was written on her behalf, identities were a problem: ‘The names of all plants both Indian &c from the Islands differ so much, the English giveing them names according to their fancies that it is impossible to send names.’72Sloane MS 4070, fol. 110. There followed: ‘These are ye names of ye Plants wch Grow in Barbados Collected by me James Reed gardner in ye yeare 1690’ (Sloane MS 4070, fols 19–21). In 1692 the duchess recorded Lord Clarendon’s note of ‘Seeds from the West Indies’ (Sloane MS 3343, fol. 185–185v). Again she encountered discrepancies between name and plant. She was beginning to grapple with the cataloguing that had engaged the royal botanist Leonard Plukenet, among others. In 1692 and 1693 catalogues of plants at Hampton Court appear in her records (Sloane MS 3343, fols 1–7). One list from the royal gardens is entitled ‘fforreigne plants raised from seeds att Hampton Court 1692’ (Sloane MS 3343, fol. 5). If names were complicated enough, so were the cultural requirements of each foreign plant. On 14 May 1690 George London was providing instructions on how to grow the North American Magnolia virginiana, the first exotic magnolia in England (see again pl. 78):

this is a large Shrubb in Virginia, and growes Moste times in their swampishe wett places, the flo’re is large and smells very sweet wch flo’res ye planters Make them into Nosegays as a great raritie.

to raise them from seeds, requires only ye Naturale heat of the Spring, sowe them in a pott or small Case, some times they come up ye first year, some times not till ye second.

When they are up drawe them on for two seasons, in wch time they will be stronge enoughe to be planted into a small Case, and then keep them in places out of ye windes but yett to have ye heat of ye Sune.73Sloane MS 4072, fol. 202.

It is clear that what would become a fully acclimatized feature of English pleasure grounds was initially treated with utmost care. Although outside the stove, the plant still needed nursing in a case, but not as much as the tropical Barbados lily in its hot bed or glass case at Badminton.

It was in 1698 that the duchess decided to convert her greenhouse at Badminton into a tropical hothouse. Her ‘Cash Books’ reveal a flurry of activity in the ‘Orringere’ from September 1698 onwards.74Gloucestershire Record Office, Badminton Papers, D2700 QB 3/2. It is worth noting that the term ‘Orringerie’ or ‘Orringere’ clearly refers to the greenhouse structure itself rather than to the space outside for displaying citrus and other exotics. Jan Woudstra points out in his essay ‘The Re-instatement of the Greenhouse Quarter at Hampton Court Palace’, Garden History, XXXVII/1 (Spring 2009), 82, that the nomenclature in the Hampton Court accounts is inconsistent: ‘Glass Case’ might also be called ‘Green House’, and a different ‘Greenhouse’ might be called ‘Orangery’. By 7 February 1699 work was being undertaken on a chimney and on plastering and glazing. Late February and into March the work continued on ‘ye New Stove’. Her cultivation of tropical plants in ‘stoves’ or hot beds in the 1690s thus changed in 1699 with the completion of a full-blown tropical stove.75See again Chambers, ‘Storys of Plants’, 49–60. This coincided with Sloane’s help on the herbarium, the hortus siccus. Hence exotic display and taxonomic identification — of plants, alive or dead, or drawn from life — provided one impetus, the other being the models of Chelsea and Hampton Court. Both types of hothouse construction drew upon Dutch precedents, especially the glass-frame technology of Amsterdam. Interestingly, it was a well-connected Dutch lady, Magdalena Poulle, who had demonstrated the way of converting a conventional greenhouse into a tropical stove (see pl. 53b).76For the origins of the Dutch hothouse, see D. O. Wijnands, ‘Hortus auriaci: The Gardens of Orange and their Place in Late 17th-century Botany and Horticulture’, in The Anglo-Dutch Garden in the Age of William and Mary, ed. John Dixon Hunt and Erik de Jong, special issue of Journal of Garden History, VIII/2–3 (April–September 1988), 75–6. For the Dutch hot-house and Magdalena Poulle, see Marisca Sikkens-De Zwaan, ‘Magdalena Poulle (1632–99): A Dutch Lady in a Circle of Botanical Collectors’, Garden History, XXX/2 (Winter 2002), 212–14. By comparison, the conversion at Badminton appears less radical; perhaps the duke, just before his death, restrained expenditure (though that is not indicated in the otherwise revealing letter the duchess sent to Sloane in 1699).77Sloane MS 4078, fols 385–6. The date appears to be May 1699, since the opening of the letter runs extensively over the 1st duke of Beaufort’s ill health. This important letter, written by the duchess and sent to Hans Sloane from Badminton, shows the steps from hot beds to the hothouse or ‘Conservatory’, which was converted in the year before the duke’s death: ‘all the good things you have sent mee, they they [sic] came very safe, I have had of the Shaddocks [Citrus maxima] formerly but none so ripe, it is a delicate fruite, I have a small tree of 4 years growth, if there bee a lesser smaller sort, I doubt my tree is of that, the leavs being but small, I have put some of these seeds in the ground hott bed, the seeds presented to the College by the East India Company I feare have fallen into such hands as a parcell that Mr London sent mee 2 years since happen’d to do, severall of those having [names wrong?] belonging to them (they being ordinary seeds) this is the list of those you were so kind as to send mee, I have writ upon the side my opinion of them, those that are come up apeare to bee what I thought them, when they are enough growne to show themselves, I will send you dry’d leavs of each, I expect more every day if the sun will bee so kind as to shine, every seed I sow’d of the cotton & Gourd that came wth them comes up, they have never been out of my Cabinet since they came, so that I am sure my gardiner has plai’d mee no tricks, I hope in God my Lords health will not make mee wish you in this place, but if anything else would bring you this way, it would please mee extreamly to have you see what a great Con[servatory?] my Lord has made for all Curiositys, beside the Stoves.’ I am grateful to Margaret Riley for help with this transcription. Despite this, Mary, as dowager duchess, would eventually surpass Magdalena in her exotic collections. A few of the plants listed by George London at Poulle’s Gunterstein in 1685 appear in the Kickius album.78Sikkens-De Zwaan, ‘Magdalena Poulle’, 217. For example, Abelmoschus esculentus, depicted as ‘Alcea Maxima’ on folio 10, had perhaps come from the East India Company’s seed largesse (pl. 79).79See here the Royal Society Journal Book Copy, vol. IX, p. 132: 1 March 1698/9: seeds from E. I. collection to be given to Sloane to distribute to a number of collectors (Robert Uvedale, Samuel Doody, Henry Compton, bishop of London, Charles du Bois and Jacob Bobart), as well as the duchess of Beaufort. There is also a list of East India Company seeds in Sloane MS 3343, fol. 130. I am grateful to Margaret Riley for this information. The exotics of India were to play a significant role alongside the plants of the New World. How the duchess grappled with their names, and how she accommodated their different cultural needs in a single structure, unfolded over the period 1700–05. Hans Sloane, William Sherard and Everhard Kick each helped in turn in her grand new project.

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79. Everhard Kick (Kickius), Badminton florilegium, album one (1703–5), fol. 10, watercolour and bodycolour, heightened with gum, over graphite underdrawing, on vellum, 23 × 16 ¾ in. (58.4 × 42.5 cm). Badminton House. Photograph reproduced with the kind permission of His Grace the Duke of Beaufort

The large plant in the centre is okra (Abelmoschus esculentus), which was grown as a heat-and-humidity-loving annual within the duchess’s ‘tropical stove’. Alongside it is Anacampseros telephiastrum, a succulent adapted to the semi-arid climate of the Cape of Good Hope. The latter, while usually considered first grown by James Sherard, who had it depicted in J. J. Dillenius’s Hortus Elthamensis (1732), was clearly in cultivation at Badminton several decades earlier. Because ‘dry stoves’ were developed only in the 1730s, the duchess had to manage growing succulents in her humid conservatory.

Naming and Picturing the Natural World: The Origins of the Hortus Siccus and the Florilegium

George London did not confine himself to plants of the New World; he also sent the duchess seeds from Portugal, the Canaries and Africa.80Sloane MS 3343, fols 232, 241, 247–8. Up until 1699 he was procuring seeds from various parts of Africa, including the Cape of Good Hope.81Sloane MS 3343, fols 79–80, 94, 238, 279–80. In July 1696 he supplied her with seeds from China.82Sloane MS 3343, fols 261–2. It was the Chinese plants that gave the greatest naming difficulties. One list from the same period was entitled ‘Seeds from China the names gues’d at mark’t only wth figures & a St. Andrews crosse X’.83Sloane MS 3343, fol. 131. As late as March 1703 the duchess noted that Chinese seeds from Dr Sherard were marked with a ‘cipher until the proper catalogue of her plants was finished and they could be identified’.84Sloane MS 3343, fol. 164.

Bedevilled by Chinese names, the duchess even struggled with local names. Uncertainty is evident in her obsessive lists: ‘that which Gerrard called Sea Lavender is by Parkinson called Limonium majus vulgatius Sea marsh buglosse, this is one of the plants that came from Swansy’.85Sloane MS 4071, fol. 199. In a list of seeds originally sent to Lord Clarendon in March 1694 (which included tamarind at 3 feet), she observed: ‘The seed that rais’d this plant was given mee by the name of Cowage [perhaps the medicinal Mucuna pruriens] but is not that’.86Sloane MS 3343, fol. 43. Sharpness turns caustic in what she regarded as Parkinson’s misrepresentation in his Theatrum botanicum (1660): ‘Lysimachia; the pritty plant that blows all summer Park 545:1 — false’.87Sloane MS 3349, fol. 1. While her questioning of the yellow loosestrife (and its summer flowering) appears nonsensical as well as bad-tempered, it points to the dowager duchess trying to get to grips with the language of botany used by Hans Sloane and William Sherard. To her physician and botanical adviser, Sloane, she was always impeccably courteous and humble. Sloane, as becomes clear from the archival record, responded with equal respect: the herbarium was their joint initiative.

Letters to Hans Sloane document how the herbarium and the flower albums came into being. Here was a way to organize plants as archetypes, thus counteracting the confusion of multiple names. The letters were written in the years either side of the duke’s death in January 1700. They also involve the appointment of William Sherard as tutor to his grandson, which he took up in August 1700 (pl. 80). He had previously failed to get the appointment as botanist to Hampton Court, which went to Leonard Plukenet. Sherard was thus doubtless relieved to mix botanizing with tutoring at such an illustrious establishment. As household botanist for eighteen months, he would be well placed to help with nomenclature, which had otherwise fallen to Sloane’s spare time. The duchess’s undated letter to Sloane, possibly of September 1699, already requested help with identifying the plants. Thanking him for the ‘trouble of getting mee a booke bound for my Parchments’, she continued:

I will have loose papers put into the booke wth those names I thinke belongs to them if you will bee troubl’d wth them, to see the faults before they are in the booke . . . it beeing pitty to have them after so much charge to bee false nam’d, wch may easily bee done by mee, most of them being rais’d from seed wch came wthout names.88Sloane MS 4061, fol. 17.

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Description: William Sherard by Anonymous

80. Anonymous, William Sherard, before 1728, oil on canvas, 32 ⅜ × 27 ⅛ in. (82.2 × 69 cm). Oxford University Herbaria, Department of Plant Sciences, University of Oxford. Courtesy of the Sherardian Professor of Botany, University of Oxford

William Sherard (1659–1728), studying law at St John’s College, Oxford (1678–83), turned, in the 1680s, to studying botany with Tournefort in Paris and Hermann in Leiden. He spent much of the 1690s in the role of private tutor. On the advice of Hans Sloane, the duchess of Beaufort appointed Sherard in 1700 as tutor to her grandson, the 2nd duke of Beaufort. The duchess hoped that the gardener George Adams might become proficient in painting her new plants (including hundreds of nondescripts), which Sherard began cataloguing. Yet, with the departure of Sherard on the young duke’s maturity (1702), the momentum passed to Kickius as the duchess’s botanical artist from 1703 to 1705.

This first small ‘book’ (now HS 66 at the Natural History Museum, London) is described by Sloane as: ‘Plants sent me (S.H.S) from Badminton by her Grace the Dutchess of Beaufort, very well preserved and flourishing there better then in any garden of Europe I ever saw.’89Cited in The Sloane Herbarium, ed. Dandy, 210. By December, presumably of that same year (1699), the duchess was indicating how keeping another small folio volume (now HS 235) was a step towards the twelve-volume hortus siccus:90Ibid., 211.

I am sorry I did not make the booke bigger, haveing neer as many more as well dry’d, some flowers I have added to embellish the booke, I doubt you will find many false names, but they are as my Lords Gardiner [Adams] & I usually calls them, hee has been in this the scribe, & neither hee nor I understand latine so that I feare wee have commited many faults . . .91Sloane MS 4061, fol. 19.

These two small volumes were lent to John Ray, who wrote back to Sloane on 24 November 1703, just a few days before the Great Storm: ‘the specimens . . . are very fair ones, and curiously dried and preserved’.92Dandy, ed., The Sloane Herbarium, 211.

Because of the duchess’s imperfect learning, she made studious efforts to educate herself. A list of ‘Seeds sent by Dr Sloan 1699’ contains a few Latin botanical identifications in her hand among common and Chinese names.93Sloane MS 3343, fol. 97. She worked from a ‘Table of Classes of different Species of Plantes’,94Sloane MS 4072, fols 177–8. making a list of Latin epithets: ‘Pratensis, belonging to a meadow’; or ‘Angustifolia wth narrow leaves’; or ‘Paluster moorish, fenny or belonging to a fen’.95Sloane MS 4070, fol. 199. But none of this made the task of identifying Chinese plants any easier. ‘I wish I had a painter that would have better exprest this plant,’ she wrote in an undated letter to Sloane of about 1700, which also emphasized the importance of roots:

but finding it in no booke that I have, I hope it is a rarity, if it bee worth yr keeping it is intended for you, it was rais’d from some East India seed wthout a name, it was sow’d I thinke 4 yeare past, has blowne twise, the leavs till neer there full growth stand upright, but assoone as the stalk of the flower apears hang round the pot, they are the best green I ever saw plant, but that I most wonder is the root.96Sloane MS 4061, fol. 23.

She made frequent reference to Hendrik Adriaan van Reede tot Drakenstein’s monumental Hortus Malabaricus, which had appeared in twelve volumes from 1678 to 1693; and she noted ‘Malabar names and words’ such as ‘Nir — growing in watry places’.97For an account of the Hortus Malabaricus, see Ray Desmond, The European Discovery of the Indian Flora (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 19–24. Desmond refers to the Hortus Malabaricus as not just a first ‘regional floristic survey’ but also ‘a repository of ayurvedic medicine practised in Malabar’. See also the more recent English edition, with annotations and modern botanical nomenclature, by K. S. Manilal (Thiruvananthapuram: University of Kerala, 2003). She listed the Hortus Malabaricus among more than twenty other reference works. Significantly, she took a lead from a visual rather than a verbal cue: ‘Books of Plants refer’d to in this Catalogue. They are refer’d to ye Prints and not to ye Descriptions.’98Sloane MS 3349, fols 6v–7v. See again Desmond, The European Discovery of the Indian Flora, 23. He describes Van Reede’s work as indispensable to botanists: ‘The morphology of some 690 species is systematically presented: root, stem or trunk, leaf, flower, fruit, and seed. Even scent and flavour are recorded. Each description concludes with the plant’s use in agriculture, commerce or medicine. Plant names are given in Portuguese, Malayalam, Arabic, several South Indian scripts, and in Konkani in devanagari script.’

William Sherard began his appointment at Badminton in August 1700. By that point in his life, he had one private garden to compare to the duchess’s: Moira in County Down, Ireland. It belonged to Sir Arthur Rawdon, who had requested plants of Hans Sloane when he left for Jamaica in 1687. By 1690 Rawdon’s conservatory was constructed to house them, along with about a thousand living plants brought back from Jamaica by James Harlow in 1692. Sherard’s time at Moira was later a cause of regret: ‘I lost three years and a half of my life.’ Yet it introduced him to the raising of ‘Barbados plants’ from James Reed’s seeds of 1690 (destined for Hampton Court and desired by the duchess), to the local flora of the Mourne Mountains, and to Harlow’s living Jamaican plants. It was the transportation of the last (a century and a half before the Wardian case) that stood out as exceptional for the time.99All details from Nelson, ‘Sir Arthur Rawdon (1662–1695) of Moira’. Leaving Ireland in 1694 and owed £180 by Rawdon (which he never obtained), Sherard had to make do with itinerant years as companion and tutor respectively to Viscount Townsend and the marquess of Tavistock. He benefitted, though, in terms of contact with Continental plant collectors and botanists, and already in December 1699 he was sending seeds to the duchess.100Sloane MS 3343, fols 88–9.

Despite failing to extract an annual salary from the duchess,101Sloane MS 4061, fol. 3. Sherard’s initial impressions of Badminton were favourable: ‘I was extreamly surpris’d to see ye gardens, w.ch out do any in Europe; I shall give Mr. Ray some acc.t of them there being a great many nondescripts in good state to describe’, he wrote to Sloane on 10 August 1700.102Sloane MS 4038, fol. 47–47v. Through his contacts, from South Africa to Sicily, Sherard brought numerous succulents and possibly up to 300 new species into cultivation at Badminton, also liberally sharing seeds with Dr Uvedale; his brother James Sherard helped liaise with James Petiver for plants for Badminton.103Sloane MS 4063, fol. 54, letter from Sherard at Badminton to James Petiver, dated 11 December 1700, and fol. 83, letter from Sherard to James Petiver, dated 28 April 1701; see also Sloane MS 4063, fols 58, 89, 90, 97, 138 and 145. On 21 September 1701 he wrote to Petiver of plentiful guavas and Spanish olives in flower at Badminton:

I’me sure no place raises or preserves plants better than is done here. The gardiner [Adams] dos not only design very exactly, but is learning to paint in water colours, so yt next summer he is to paint whatever I shall order & in ye mean Time designs whats new; & I will describe them in order to acatalogue.104Sloane MS 4063, fol. 44. On 27 September 1701 he wrote: ‘in ye mean time I shall not neglect drying plants. Mr. Adams is here designing some new plants & returns you his service’, Sloane MS 4063, fol. 120.

In other words, Sherard would describe the plants and Adams would paint them.

All was in place to solve the matter of naming and picturing. Yet, as early as 28 October 1700 Sherard had grumbled to Sloane about his pupil Henry, the sixteen-year-old grandson and 2nd duke of Beaufort: ‘I never met w.th any body yt has so little genius for learning (or anything else but horses, dogs & sport) as his Grace.’105Sloane MS 4038, fol. 84. Henry was willing to let his grandmother run aspects of the estate, yet clearly by the spring of 1702 the terms of Sherard’s appointment as tutor had run their course. Late in 1703 the young duke began overseeing control of estate matters.106See the cash books in Gloucestershire Record Office, Badminton Papers D2700 QB 3/2. The duchess’s signature (MB) on expenditures continues through 1702. On 6 October 1703 the 2nd duke’s signature had appeared. Sherard would leave for Smyrna, and the problem of naming and picturing passed back to Sloane. The appointment in July 1703 of Everhard Kick, the man who painted Sloane’s Jamaica plants, came as a welcome solution.

Little is known of Kickius’s early life other than he was ‘bred’ in Germany and may have arrived in London in the 1660s. From circa 1675, and into the 1690s, he was working as a draughtsman, painter and interior decorator. By 1700–01 he was a member of Sloane’s artistic entourage (and perhaps a member of his ‘household’). He was employed to make drawings. These monochrome (pen and ink and wash) drawings — signed between July 1700 and August 1701 — were of herbarium specimens, engraved for Sloane’s Natural History of Jamaica (1707 and 1725). Kickius also made coloured drawings of ‘monkeys, beasts, etc. done at Bartholomew fair etc by my [Sloane’s] order’. These were for Sloane’s albums of natural history drawings (‘Miniatura’), and they are signed but not dated. After Kickius’s departure from Badminton, no references to his life and art have been found, which makes the flowering of his art over two years at Badminton all the more startling.107Research under way by Sachiko Kusukawa, Henrietta McBurney and Felicity Roberts will be published in ‘Everhard Kickius (c.1636–after 1705): The Work of a Little-Known Dutch Artist in Britain’ (submitted to Archives of Natural History in autumn 2014). I am greatly indebted to the authors for giving me vital information ahead of this publication. What is clear is that he came to Badminton having produced scientifically accurate drawings to Sloane’s straightforward specifications.108Personal communication from Charlie Jarvis (29 January 2014): ‘I would assume that ‘scientifically accurate’ was Sloane’s brief. But the drawings frequently did not go into the sort of floral detail that later scientists (e.g., Linnaeus) would have demanded’. Kick’s artistic flair thus emerged most forcefully with the new imperatives of the duchess’s expressive florilegium.

The Kickius Album (1703–1705) and ‘All Curiositys’

In July 1703, as ‘from the Life growing’, Kickius began the first album of the florilegium. Whatever method he followed over two years, the sequencing of the album points to the duchess’s preoccupations. Multifarious ‘Aloes’ are featured on the first seven folios, these Cape succulents including ‘Aloe Aquatica fol jridis’ (Bulbine frutescens, pl. 81) and ‘A fine painted Aloe. Aloe Afric. Humilis fol ex albo & viridi variegato’ (Aloe variegata). Seeds of the latter had been sent to the Netherlands around 1700. By 1702 the plant was in England. The horticulturist Richard Bradley played an important role in bringing over such water-retaining species of arid regions and gave them a memorable name: ‘pretty succulent monsters’.109Cited in Rowley, ‘The Duchess of Beaufort’s Succulent Plants’, 6.

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Description: Bulbine frutescens by Kickius, Everhardus

81. Everhard Kick (Kickius), Badminton florilegium, album one (1703–5), fol. 3, watercolour and bodycolour, heightened with gum, over graphite underdrawing, on vellum, 23 × 16 ¾ in. (58.4 × 42.5 cm). Badminton House. Photograph reproduced with the kind permission of His Grace the Duke of Beaufort

Unlike his characteristically tripartite compositions of plants, Kick dedicated this folio to one succulent only: Bulbine frutescens. It appears to have been introduced to cultivation in England by 1702, and hence the duchess must have been among the first to grow it. In the next generation, it turns up as one of the succulents grown by James Sherard (William Sherard’s brother) at his garden in Eltham, just to the south of London. J. J. Dillenius illustrated it in Hortus Elthamensis (1732).

In May 1714, well after the duchess had departed from Badminton for Beaufort House, where she spent her final years, Petiver wrote to her, recommending Bradley as the ideal expert on succulents. Aloes, cacti and ‘ficoides’ were duly dispatched by boat, including ‘a new sort of Fritilaria crassa’ (Stapelia pulvinata).110This account comes from Will Tjaden, ‘Richard Bradley . . . Succulent Plant Pioneer’, in Bulletin of the African Succulent Plant Society (1973–6), vol. VIII, 132, to vol. XI, 125, cited in Rowley, ‘The Duchess of Beaufort’s Succulent Plants’, 6. See also John Edmondson, ‘Richard Bradley (c.1688–1732): An Annotated Bibliography, 1710–1818’, Archives of Natural History, xxix/2 (October 2002), 177–212. Bradley asked for surprisingly high prices, which the duchess was willing to pay at the end of her life. It is not clear when he came to visit her collections, but in his History of Succulent Plants (beginning in 1716) he referred to her triumphs of cultivation. On Opuntia curassavica, he wrote:

the whole Plant seldom exceeds two Foot high in our Climate, where it has not been known to produce either Flower or Fruit, unless in the Gardens at Badminton, belonging to that incomparable Patroness of Natural Learning, the late Dutchess of Beaufort, by whose excellent Skill in Direction, this Plant was brought to blossom about June.111Quoted in Rowley, ‘The Duchess of Beaufort’s Succulent Plants’, 6–7.

On Eberlanzia spinosa, he wrote: ‘I have only seen this Plant in the Garden of the late celebrated Dutchess of Beaufort.’ Whether this ‘Garden’ referred to Beaufort House or Badminton is unclear, but the latter with its stove is the more likely location.

The duchess’s preoccupation with groups (e.g., ‘Aloes’) runs through the entire Kickius album. Folios 19–22, for example, feature thistles, then lumped together as ‘Carduus’, intermixed with other prickly species (cf. pl. 90);112For example, fol. 19 has Argemone mexicana alongside a thistle ‘Carduus with a white Flower’ (Cnicus ferox). the mixum-gatherum group ‘Ficoides’ takes up folios 35–45. A preponderance of South African succulents stands out: thirty-seven species from the Cape (if those by Daniel Frankcom in the second album are included), as compared to fifteen from the rest of the world. The figure stands up well against the forty South African succulents featured in Bradley’s plates of 1716–27. Indeed, the fact that the duchess appears to have cultivated some (for example, Aloe variegata) twenty years — and many others several decades, or even a century (e.g., Drosanthemum lique) — before the received ‘date of introduction’ to England points to a remarkable collecting record. She was catching up fast on collections elsewhere in Europe, notably the vanguard Dutch rarities.

These lovers of dry environments were apparently placed in the stove alongside palms, orchids, ferns and tropical plants. Due to lack of light, the succulents that Kick portrayed show signs of etiolation.113Rowley, ‘The Duchess of Beaufort’s Succulent Plants’, 3 and 10. A straggly appearance also resulted from a combination of excessive moisture, low light levels and excessive heat; for the duchess had the succulents randomly assembled together in the conservatory. In effect, designed for ‘all Curiositys’, it was a hothouse ‘cabinet of curiosities’. Doubtless many of the succulents were cultivated in tubs and pots for display outdoors during the summer (see again pl. 59). Hence there was some control on culture, but this fell well short of the ideal conditions later identified as suitable for such plants: a dry stove.

The omnium-gatherum nature of the stove is reflected in the assorted species of the Kick album. Folio 9, for example, depicts a species from the Indian subcontinent: ‘Adhatoda Zeylanensium Cat: Leyden 643 Pluk: 173’ (Justicia adhatoda). In describing her ‘conservatory’ to Sloane, the duchess explained how this Himalaya species attained the height of an 18-foot wall at the rear of the structure (see again pl. 59). Other specimens, in pots on a shelf and on the ground, resembled a ‘hedge’.114See again Sloane MS 4078, fol. 385. In a further contrast to the succulents, Kickius’s ‘Amaranthus Globosus Amst: v: 1.st 45 Bre: 51’ (Gomphrena globosa) of folio 12 represents a grandiose, rather larger-than-life portrait of a diminutive plant from the tropics. The globe amaranth would later prove adaptable to hotbed cultivation for summer ‘bedding out’, but the duchess must have cultivated this annual by sowing it within her stove.115In 1789 William Aiton’s Hortus Kewensis gave the credit to the duchess as the first to cultivate it in England. Her specimen is preserved in the hortus siccus, HS 133, fol. 12. Thus the tiny grew alongside the gigantic; the succulent from the Cape sat next to the tropical from the Indies.

Folios 13 and 14 feature two species of ‘Apocynum’. The first — ‘Apocynum Americanum Chamænerij folijs Hermans Paradis Batavia 36 Pluk: 241:2’ — is Asclepias curassavica from Curaçao in the Caribbean. Like the annual globe amaranth, this was a plant of hot-bed or stove cultivation in English conditions. The second — ‘Apocynum rectum elatius salicis angusto fol: Pluk: 138.2’ — with its characteristic inflated pods, is Gomphocarpus fruticosus. William Aiton considered it first cultivated in England by the duchess (pl. 82a). Her corresponding specimen can be found in the hortus siccus, HS 137, folio 67 (pl. 82b). Specimen and painting distinguished this African plant from the related New World species within the duchess’s group ‘Apocynum’.

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82a. Everhard Kick (Kickius), Badminton florilegium, album one (1703–5), fol. 14, watercolour and bodycolour, heightened with gum, over graphite underdrawing, on vellum, 23 × 16 ¾ in. (58.4 × 42.5 cm). Badminton House. Photograph reproduced with the kind permission of His Grace the Duke of Beaufort

The centrepiece of Kick’s tripartite composition is unmistakable despite some artistic flourishes: Gomphocarpus fruticosus. The identification is confirmed by the specimen in the duchess’s hortus siccus. William Aiton’s Hortus Kewensis (1789) gave her the credit for being the first to cultivate this South African perennial. Aiton’s date of introduction — 1714 — can be brought back to around 1703, when Kick was painting the florilegium ‘from the Life growing’. The plant was cultivated in the Badminton conservatory along with the two flanking species, the left being an Armeria sp. (a type of thrift).

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Description: Specimen of Gomphocarpus fruticosus

82b. Specimen of Gomphocarpus fruticosus in the Sloane Herbarium, the duchess’s hortus siccus, vol. CXXXIII, fol. 67. © The Natural History Museum, London

Despite the groupings within the album — ‘Aloes’, ‘Carduus’, ‘Apocynum’ — many of Kick’s compositions point to a random assemblage, even what happened to be growing in a given part of the conservatory (see again pl. 69). The composition of folio 15 suggests a group of plants chosen explicitly to display contrasts of foliage (since their flowers are insignificant, pl. 83). Ruscus hypophyllum, well known to gardeners and botanists since 1625, is thus in an unlikely, but exquisite, trinity with the feathery tropical ‘Asparagus Zeylanica &c.’ (as yet unidentified) and ‘Phyllitis seu ling: cervina minor crispa folio Pluk: 248: 2’, the native hart’s-tongue fern (Asplenium scolopendrium var. cristatum). The duchess’s interests in the new aesthetic effects achievable in horticulture were perhaps being tested out in Kick’s compositions.

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83. Everhard Kick (Kickius), Badminton florilegium, album one (1703–5), fol. 15 (detail), watercolour and bodycolour, heightened with gum, over graphite underdrawing, on vellum, 23 × 16 ¾ in. (58.4 × 42.5 cm). Badminton House. Photograph reproduced by kind permission of His Grace the Duke of Beaufort

The dominant central plant is shown by Kickius to have an extensive root system. These may be tubers of an Asian Asparagus (yet to be identified by species). Some asparagus species were used extensively in medicines in the East. On its left, the red fruits of Ruscus hypophyllum are beautifully presented to the viewer, while, on the right, the ‘cristate’ variety of the hart’s-tongue fern (Asplenium scolopendrium) forms a lovely counterpoint with its crested leafing. Kick’s tripartite composition, emphasizing the roots of older herbals, is also a splendid study of the potential of foliage in refined gardening.

Whatever the rationale for these startling juxtapositions, the fact that Kickius shows the roots in great detail points to the retention of a conventional feature of herbals of the sixteenth century in the tradition of Otto Brunfels, Hans Weiditz and Leonhart Fuchs — one that is missing in Alexander Marshal’s florilegium. Roots had always been crucial to identifying a plant’s medicinal properties.116For issues of representation in natural history, see Victoria Dickenson, Drawn From Life: Science and Art in the Portrayal of the New World (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 78. The duchess, familiar with the works of John Gerard and John Parkinson, would have known the woodcuts absorbed into English herbals (William Turner’s A New Herball using Fuchs, for example; Gerard’s Herball of 1597 illustrated from blocks used in the Eicones plantarum of Tabernæmontanus; and Parkinson’s Paradisus of 1629 — ‘crudely cut’ from much borrowed material).117See Wilfrid Blunt, The Art of Botanical Illustration [1950], ed. William T. Stearn (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1994), chapter 6. She also possessed the botanist-apothecary Basilius Besler’s great Hortus Eystettensis (1613), which was in the new genre of florilegium, yet retaining features of the older printed herbals.118See Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi, An Oak Spring Flora (Upperville, VA: Oak Spring Garden Library, 1994), chapter II: ‘Florilegia: Flower Books for Collectors and Connoisseurs’, 17–28: ‘The first printed herbals date from the middle decades of the sixteenth century, while the first florilegia began to appear around 1600.’ Unlike the written and illustrated herbal, a florilegium without much text revealed the sheer beauty of the flower through illustrations drawn from life (and only sometimes with the root or bulb included).

The duchess’s interest in native plants such as the hart’s-tongue fern is clear from her hortus siccus. For example, the specimen of that same ‘cristate’ hart’s-tongue fern (hs 137, fol. 48) is dated 1702. A specimen of Athyrium filix-femina is preserved in the small hs 235, folio 30. This appears to date from around 1700. She had noted it as ‘the fearne you gather’d at Tunbridge’.119Discussed in The Sloane Herbarium, ed. Dandy, 211. Gentiana pneumonanthe, from ‘the heath by Tunbridg wells’ (HS 135, fol. 40), and Polystichum aculeatum ‘from Tunbridg’ (HS 140, fol. 34), consolidate an impression that the duchess was having material collected in England and Wales from localities in the wild.120Ibid., 212. For all that, Kick was clearly painting a hart’s-tongue fern that was cultivated at Badminton, and presumably in the conservatory, though it would flourish outdoors.

Study of the native flora was beginning to spawn its own native imagery (as opposed to borrowed Continental woodcuts): for example, a short segment of Marshal’s florilegium (fols 130–34, pl. 84) is devoted to wild flowers of ornamental character. A more notable contribution was one album of forty botanical watercolours by Richard Waller (circa 1646–?1715).121See Blunt, The Art of Botanical Illustration, 146. Blunt referred to Waller’s ‘sureness of touch and a sensibility that few professional painters of the day could command’. See Lawrence R. Griffing, ‘Who Invented the Dichotomous Key? Richard Waller’s Watercolors of the Herbs of Britain’, American Journal of Botany, LXXXVIII/12 (December 2011), 1911–23, which comments: ‘The accuracy of the identification of the watercolors is excellent.’ On the question of publication, Griffing wrote: ‘The suggestion is made in the Turning-the-Pages document (Royal Society of London, 2010) that Waller’s watercolors may have been intended as a set of illustrations for the classification system in Historia plantarum (Ray, 1686, 1688) . . . However, as described below, the watercolors of Waller were not intended as illustrations for a classification system, but as an identification key, based on images, produced as a folio arranged in leaf-ordered hierarchical clusters (tables), which serve as the search function for identification.’ Whether intending publication or not, Waller produced the set, now housed in the library of the Royal Society, some time after he became secretary in 1687. In a letter of 5 April 1688 he made his intentions clear to John Ray: ‘SIR, Since one of the chief Ends of an Herbal is thereby to attain a true knowledge of Plants, I have adventured to propose my Thoughts to you, how by a few Tables, with Iconisms, one wholly ignorant in Plants may know how to find any unknown Plant.’122Quoted in Griffing, ‘Who Invented the Dichotomous Key?’. It seems possible that the duchess was aware of his work, since there is a record of twenty-five ‘Plants designed by R.W.’ among her miscellaneous papers.123Sloane MS 4071, fol. 2; see also Sloane MS 4063, fol. 163. She would have grasped the general intention of such ‘Iconisms’.

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Description: Florilegium, fol. 132 by Marshal, Alexander

84. Alexander Marshal, fol. 132 (RL 24399) of his florilegium, 1650s–1682, watercolour on paper, approx. 18 ⅛ × 13 ⅛ in. (approx. 46 × 33.3 cm). Royal Library, Windsor Castle. Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2013

These three plants form a trinity of English wild flowers. Although placed towards the end of the florilegium (in Marshal’s ‘autumn’), their flowering times are early to late summer. Butomus umbellatus (top), a flowering rush with triangular-section leaves as shown by Marshal, grows in ponds. Menyanthes trifoliata (lower left) prefers watery bogs. Ragged robin (Lychnis flos-cuculi, lower right) grows in wet meadows and marshes. Such beautiful representations of English natives are comparable to later studies by Thomas Robins the Elder, G. D. Ehret (see pl. 183), Mary Delany and William Kilburn.

Waller was a city merchant, a financial contributor to the Royal Society, a translator, an enthusiast for botany, an accomplished amateur artist and a biographer of his close friend, the inventor and microscopist Robert Hooke. Many of his studies feature grasses. He lavished much tenderness as well as scrupulous observation on grasses, but also on the commonplace groundsel, knapweed and cornflower (pl. 85). His method is far superior to that of Kickius in matters of botany, especially since he worked with a microscope: the highly detailed flower drawings in pencil, made with the aid of a lens, allowed for easier discernment of differences in flower types. Kickius excelled in formal effect through dramatic plant physiognomy, possibly by exaggerating features (pl. 86).124I am grateful to Charles Nelson for posing the question: is this a chance variant in nature or in cultivation, or is it Kick’s stylized exaggeration? (It has been pointed out, however, that, with succulents, Kick ‘nearly always correctly interpreted details of flower structure and phyllotaxy so dear to taxonomists’.125Observation made by Rowley, ‘The Duchess of Beaufort’s Succulent Plants’, 8. His full assessment was that Kickius was a ‘good botanical artist’, despite occasional errors and despite the stylized nature of the environmental settings.) Kickius responded to the duchess’s wish for florilegium display — what she called her collection of ‘all Curiositys’ — with appropriate Baroque magnificence. Many of the folios are in the form of a choreographed ‘scene’. The setting thus forms a miniature landscape or territory.

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Description: Fol. 40 of forty watercolors of English natives by Waller, Richard

85. Richard Waller (circa 1646–?1715), fol. 40 (RS 8394), 15 × 9 ½ in. (38 × 24 cm), dated to 1689, one of forty watercolours on paper in an album in the Royal Society Library, London. © The Royal Society

About half of Waller’s forty watercolours of English natives are of grasses. On this folio, Waller, who was secretary to the Royal Society from 1687 and corresponded with John Ray in 1688, turned his attention to knapweed (Centaurea nigra) and cornflower (Centaurea cyanus). The work is of great precision, both artistically and scientifically. Waller’s botanical method differed from Kickius’s and he surpassed Marshal in scientific terms, since he had the advantage of working from a microscope. The cross-sections helped discern identities by what today is called the ‘dichotomous key’.

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Description: Salvia pratensis, detail by Kickius, Everhardus

86. Everhard Kick (Kickius), Badminton florilegium, album one (1703–5), detail of fol. 16, watercolour and bodycolour, heightened with gum, over graphite underdrawing, on vellum, 23 × 16 ¾ in. (58.4 × 42.5 cm). Badminton House. Photograph reproduced with the kind permission of His Grace the Duke of Beaufort

This detail is chosen to highlight Kick’s delineation of a single stem of the British native clary (Salvia pratensis). Meadow clary would have flowered in calcareous pastures near to Badminton. Perhaps this Salvia was a chance variant cultivated from the wild within the Badminton garden, so that Kick, who correctly interpreted features of succulents, was accurately recording a cultivar. Yet perhaps he also used some artistic licence to create a dramatic representation of the wild species — the number of corollas exaggerated and each calyx (typically a third of the length of each corolla) entirely suppressed.

Territory may have meant, in the case of the duchess, a regional Welsh flora tied to self-aggrandizement through ducal domain, even though Snowdonia was well to the north of the duchy’s power base in Chepstow and Raglan. From 1696 to 1697, at the request of Jacob Bobart in Oxford, the duchess was supporting Edward Lhwyd’s collecting in Snowdonia. (Edward Lhwyd, 1660–1709, keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford from 1691, had struggled without a salary in what he called ‘a mean place’; hence, he looked for remuneration elsewhere.) A number of her plant lists include the identification ‘Snowdown’ and there are herbarium specimens too: ‘the true Mayden-hair [Adiantum capillus-veneris] sent by Mr LHWYD Au[g.] the 2 1697 grows upon the rocks neer Porth King [Porthkerry?] in Glamorganshire’ (HS 135, fol. 54 bis); and ‘Creeping Sorrell [Oxyria] from Snow:down’ (HS 137, fol. 28). The fern Cystopteris fragilis (HS 235, fol. 32) is probably from Lhwyd. One list is entitled: ‘A Catalogue of Plants sent from Llan Berys in Caernarvonshire June ye 16th 1696’.126Sloane MS 3343, fols 116–17. All these are carefully identified from Ray’s Synopsis (1690), as Bobart had recommended the previous February. In other words, the duchess valued Lhwyd’s collections from Snowdonia just as much as English ferns and the exotic imports of George London and William Sherard.

The interest in Welsh plants was perhaps first encouraged by the duchess’s participation in a ducal progress through the countryside in the summer of 1684. Thomas Smith’s commission to paint Chepstow Castle and Raglan Castle (circa 1680–90) reflects the territorial reach of the duchy as much as the Kip and Knyff views of Badminton project local power. Henry’s retinue numbered more than fifty and included four trumpeters with silver trumpets and crimson damask banners, all embroidered with His Grace’s coat of arms.127McClain, Beaufort, 174. Whether from territorial fealty or scientific-cum-personal aggrandizement, or indeed from a plain wish to augment her horticultural communities, it is evident that by the early 1690s the duchess was already engaged with a Welsh flora. She wrote in a list of ‘Phisick herbes’ on 21 September 1692, for example: ‘the plant like purslaine that came from Swansy is the Portulaca marina Sea Purslane’.128Sloane MS 4071, fol. 142.

In the Kickius album, two plants with Lhwyd provenance are depicted. The first, and perhaps the most interesting, is ‘Snowdon Cushion’ (Silene acaulis) on folio 29 (pl. 87). It is overshadowed by a tall staked plant, which is described in the caption as: ‘This came to me by the Name of White Berry Climber Hort. Mal: Pt. 5. Tab. 27’ (as yet unidentified). The second Lhwyd plant, on folio 54, is labelled ‘Sedum Alpinum ericoides cæruleum Author Snowdown Hill’ (see pl. 338b). This has been tentatively identified as Saxifraga oppositifolia.

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87. Everhard Kick (Kickius), Badminton florilegium, album one (1703–5), detail of fol. 29, watercolour and bodycolour, heightened with gum, over graphite underdrawing, on vellum, 23 × 16 ¾ in. (58.4 × 42.5 cm). Badminton House. Photograph reproduced with the kind permission of His Grace the Duke of Beaufort

While two of three species depicted by Kick on folio 29 are not yet identified, the plant labelled ‘Snowdon Cushion’ (2, left) is clearly Silene acaulis. Where and how the duchess cultivated this plant of the high mountains of North Wales remains a mystery. It seems likely that, for such mountain-dwelling natives, she had a spot within her ‘Phisick-garden’. They perhaps grew in pots of special soils mixed with rock or mortar, as horticulturists would document during the nineteenth-century craze for ‘Alpines’.

By 1723 Saxifraga oppositifolia (along with the native S. aizoides and S. hypnoides) would become readily available within the nursery trade, although Thomas Fairchild did not grow it.129John H. Harvey, ‘The English Nursery Flora, 1677–1723’, Garden History, XXVI/1 (Summer 1998), 93. This would imply a demand beyond the confines of the curious collector, apothecary or botanist, and well before William Curtis began to cultivate plants on rocks and in water at Chelsea Physic Garden in the 1770s (see chapter 6). In his ‘Elysium Britannicum’, John Evelyn had already devoted chapter XVII, ‘Of the Philosophico-Medicall Garden’, to a mount and declivities as part of a ‘garden of simples’. He placed Sedum on walls and ‘mountaine & Alpestrall’ plants in specially created soils.130John Evelyn, ‘Elysium Britannicum; or, The Royal Gardens in Three Books’, British Library, Add. MS 78342, fols 325, 326, 328; see also Evelyn, Elysium Britannicum; or, The Royal Gardens, ed. John E. Ingram (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 405. One such alpine, the mountain-dwelling Ramonda myconi (see again pl. 62a) — also available from the nursery trade during the duchess’s lifetime — was probably grown at Badminton in her ‘Physic Garden’. Kick’s Silene acaulis and Saxifraga oppositifolia were most probably there too, whether on rocks or in special pots. The duchess made a distinction in one of her endless lists — ‘plants that do not grow in the fields near Badminton therefore planted in the physic garden’.131Sloane MS 4070, fol. 35v. This implies that her collecting of what Evelyn called the ‘Indigene plants’ among the ‘simples’ might correspond to apothecary practice at Chelsea Physic Garden. That practice involved herborizing in the fields in and around London while, at the same time, growing ‘simples’ in formal quarters, that is, within numbered pulvilli or order beds, in which the student apothecary learned to identify plants by their ordering on a grid.

The ‘Phisick-garden’ of the post-1682 plan of Badminton (see pl. 67b) lies next to the ‘house’ with a yard and mounds for guinea pigs. Yet, screened from view in all the paintings from Danckerts to ‘Smith’ (pl. 88), its layout is obscured. Kick’s paintings are thus merely tantalizing glimpses into the complexity of the duchess’s horticulture, practised in and around her stove, with a forecourt to its south and the physic garden to its north-west.

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Description: Badminton from the North, Great Garden and Conservatory, detail by Smith, Thomas

88. Thomas Smith (attributed), Badminton from the North, circa 1708–10, oil on canvas, 23 × 30 in. (58.4 × 76.2 cm), detail of the Great Garden and Conservatory, Badminton House. Photograph reproduced with the kind permission of His Grace the Duke of Beaufort

A continuous use of vases or urns around the parterres of the Great Garden is apparent by comparing Danckerts’s painting of circa 1670 (see pl. 96) to this view at the very end of the duchess’s gardening at Badminton. It is likely that, after the stove conversion (1698–9), succulents (e.g., a type of ‘Aloe’, Bulbine frutescens, see pl. 81) were among the exotics displayed in such containers each summer. Despite the changed parterre layouts, the lineage of horticultural display is thus a commonality between Beaufort House and Badminton (1680s to 1700s): the duchess’s passion for Auricula became that for Aloe.

That ‘Snowdon Cushion’ (Silene acaulis) did not make its way into nursery stock at any point in the eighteenth century, yet was grown at Badminton, emphasizes the important role the duchess played in cultivating native and hardy plants well ahead of what would develop in the nineteenth century as the cult of rock and alpine floras. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, in Flora Londinensis, William Curtis described Saxifraga oppositifolia in cultivation (cf. pls 338a and b). He claimed that this saxifrage, which the Revd John Lightfoot found on most Scottish mountains, ‘revolts at all tender treatment’, yet was sold commercially in pots in London. In volume IX of Conrad Loddiges’s The Botanical Cabinet (1824), Saxifraga oppositifolia would be praised as ‘perhaps the most beautiful of this extensive genus’. It flowered by late February, and each season saw it ‘transformed from a rusty looking mossy sod into a profuse and brilliant glow of the richest purple’. The entry added: it is ‘easily cultivated in a small pot in light loam, with a little old mortar’.132Conrad Loddiges & Sons, The Botanical Cabinet, vol. IX (1824), no. 869. In all likelihood, then, the duchess had it grown in pots in her physic garden, simulating its barren conditions in nature (perhaps using a miniature rock as in the Kick folio). The duchess knew, by dint of her ‘nursing’ knowledge, how to avoid ‘tender treatment’.

Outside the Badminton Orangery and Kick’s Ambient Scenes

After the stove conversion of 1699, succulents, which could be overwintered in the Orangery, were displayed outdoors in tubs and pots each summer. This was in keeping with the aesthetic of exoticism that the duchess had practised with potted evergreens, nasturtiums and carnations in her Chelsea garden since the 1680s. Indeed, the history of horticultural display over three decades stands out as a commonality between Beaufort House and Badminton. That the duchess moved beyond the ‘flowers of distinction’ of traditional floriculture at Chelsea (tulips, auriculas, etc.) to a new vision of horticulture at Badminton is clear from the title subsequently given to the opening volume of the hortus siccus: ‘in which amongst others are the Ficus, Aloes, Opu[n]tia Various Tulips, Anemones, Ranunculuses, Auriculas, Mimosas, Acacias, etc.’.

Succulents (‘Ficus’ or ‘Aloes’), like florists’ flowers (Primula or Dianthus), were thus seen as ‘flores singulares’ — Nature’s wonders that were mutable by Culture. Hence flowers with peculiar anomalies — double blooms, teratologic forms or unusual colours — took their place alongside ‘pretty succulent monsters’.133Tomasi, An Oak Spring Flora, 17–18. In effect, floriculture had mutated into the new horticulture of tender exotics. By their sheer variety, potted prickly pears (Opuntia) placed outside the Badminton stove each summer, or aloes placed in vases in the Great Garden (see pl. 88), matched the endless forms of auricula and carnation on display at Chelsea.

Among the succulents, kindred ‘Ficoides’ dominate the album. Along with the ‘Aloes’, these succulents dramatize the duchess’s achievement in being the first in England to cultivate some thirty out of a total of forty-six succulent species depicted by Kickius and Frankcom.134Rowley, ‘The Duchess of Beaufort’s Succulent Plants’, 8. Folios 35 to 42 represent a range of plants, many in the family Mesembryanthemaceae and now known by genera such as Lampranthus and Drosanthemum. These are concentrated in southern Africa, especially around the Cape.135See Roger Phillips and Martyn Rix, Indoor and Greenhouse Plants, 2 vols (New York: Random House, 1997), 1, 215. The ‘Ficus’ and the ‘Ficus Opuntia’ of folios 43–5 follow on from the ‘Ficoides’. On folio 39, for example, there is geographical unity among the two ‘Ficoides’ (Glottiphyllum difforme and Delosperma ecklonis) and one ‘Fritillaria’ (Orbea variegata, see pl. 89); all three are Cape succulents. They, in turn, have a formal kinship with Inula candida (whose flowers seem to resemble those of the low-growing ‘Ficoides’). By contrast, ‘Limonium’ (Limonium sinuatum, a sea lavender from the Mediterranean) shares neither geographical origins nor formal kinship. Pure miscellany is what distinguishes the composition as a whole, recalling the mid-seventeenth-century world of signatures and emblematic meanings, more than the new botany of John Ray.136Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800 (London: Allen Lane, 1983), 84: ‘Though upheld by mid-seventeenth-century herbalists, the belief in signatures was rejected by John Ray and Nehemiah Grew as wholly unempirical and rapidly disappeared from official botany.’

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89. Everhard Kick (Kickius), Badminton florilegium, album one (1703–5), fol. 39, watercolour and bodycolour, heightened with gum, over graphite underdrawing, on vellum, 23 × 16 ¾ in. (58.4 × 42.5 cm). Badminton House. Photograph reproduced with the kind permission of His Grace the Duke of Beaufort

Not until Richard Bradley and Philip Miller led the way to a distinct ‘dry stove’ (as described in Miller’s Gardeners Dictionary, 1731) would plants of different geographies and climates — notably succulents of the Cape — be put into separate cultural units. Yet, though jumbled together with tropical plants, many of the succulents of the Badminton conservatory were remarkable in being the first cultivated in England: Glottiphyllum difforme (3), for example, well ahead of James Sherard at Eltham, and what could be Delosperma ecklonis (4), a century and a half before the received date of introduction.

As art rather than science, the Kickius portraits suggest a febrile imagination trying to make sense of the duchess’s feverish collecting. Folio 41 is as dainty as folio 55 is grandiose. In this extraordinary first album, Kick presented a Baroque drama that, at its best, for all the repetition of genera and occasional resort to formulaic staging, rarely flags in tone or production. Indeed, his plates ennoble even plain thistles by a sense of comportment (pl. 90). On folio 18, for example, Kickius placed the expressive ‘Golden Thistle Park: 973:3’ (Scolymus hispanicus) next to the squat ‘Hyacinthus . . . H: Est: 41’ (Scilla peruviana) and alongside the sylphlike ‘Asphodelus’ (Trachyandra revoluta or T. divaricata). With gestural complexity, the scene almost appears to make the plants dance as though choreographed for the court of Louis xiv, the Sun King.

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90. Everhard Kick (Kickius), Badminton florilegium, album one (1703–5), fol. 18, watercolour and bodycolour, heightened with gum, over graphite underdrawing, on vellum, 23 × 16 ¾ in. (58.4 × 42.5 cm). Badminton House. Photograph reproduced with the kind permission of His Grace the Duke of Beaufort

Thistles, along with other ‘prickly’ plants, form a group that the duchess had Kick represent on folios 18 to 22. The ‘Golden Thistle’ (centre) is Scolymus hispanicus, supported by a squat Scilla peruviana to its left. Many thistles, then lumped together under a group name ‘Carduus’, now prove to be distinct genera, Cnicus to Onopordum: folio 19 depicts ‘Carduus with a white flower’ (Cnicus ferox); folio 20 shows the majestic ‘Carduus tomentosus Acanthium dictum arabicus’ of Plukenet (Onopordum acanthium), with its tripartite branching; and folio 21 features the same ‘Carduus’ (O. acanthium). Such morphological resemblances helped to determine the sequence of plants illustrated, as the duchess tried to distinguish one from another.

Folio 43 provides an example of a composition that overturns the seasonal succession of Alexander Marshal’s florilegium (pl. 91). At the centre is a plant labelled ‘Ficus americana . . . Ligonis: Pag: 69 Tejakela forte. Horti Mal: Pt: 3.d Tab 57. Pluk: 178:1’ (Ficus benghalensis). It sits rather improbably over a purplish-white primrose and a sprouting plant without a name. This latter has been identified tentatively: it is either a young Eryngium amethystinum — the blue eryngo introduced to cultivation in England from the Mediterranean by the 1640s — or E. campestre, the native field eryngo. The primrose is a striped cultivar of Primula vulgaris. Miscellany, the hallmark of curious collecting, is in evidence here, but not in the sequential order of the Marshal florilegium.

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91. Everhard Kick (Kickius), Badminton florilegium, album one (1703–5), fol. 43, watercolour and bodycolour, heightened with gum, over graphite underdrawing, on vellum, 23 × 16 ¾ in. (58.4 × 42.5 cm). Badminton House. Photograph reproduced with the kind permission of His Grace the Duke of Beaufort

Unlike Alexander Marshal’s florilegium, which presented all the Primula species grown at Beaufort House in the seasonal succession of springtime, Kickius juxtaposed unlikely companion plants of different climates and seasons. Here a Primula vulgaris cultivar of spring is placed underneath a tropical fig and alongside what may be a young plant of the Mediterranean blue eryngo (Eryngium amethystinum) or its counterpart, the English native field eryngo (E. campestre) that blooms typically in July or August.

Kickius might have looked to Basilius Besler’s Hortus Eystettensis of 1613 as one model for his tripartite presentations: a large flower at the centre flanked by lesser ones (though the apothecary-author resorted to many other arrangements of fours and fives and upwards). For example, plate 103 in the Hortus Eystettensis, showing Paeonia mascula flanked by Sanicula europaea and Alchemilla vulgaris, is a fine instance of Besler’s Baroque style in three parts, with grandiloquent and theatrical effects. The references to ‘H. Est’ or ‘H E’ in Kick’s florilegium prove that Besler’s masterpiece was in the duchess’s library. (By contrast, although the duchess would have been aware of Marshal’s unpublished work, she might never have benefitted from a personal viewing such as Evelyn enjoyed in virtuosi circles in August 1682.) Folio 18 (see again pl. 90), which illustrates Scilla peruviana, with ‘H.Est: 41’ as an authority, shows how Kick relegated the central star of Besler’s plate 41 — ‘Hyacinthus stellatus peruanus’ — to a support role alongside the leading ‘Golden Thistle’. Hence Kick did not necessarily choose the obvious or formulaic.

Besler illustrated many floricultural curiosities — tulips and auriculas and carnations, then emerging in their diverse cultivated forms. As an apothecary, he also sustained the herbal tradition of showing medicinal plants with significant leaves and roots: Calamintha species, for example. A seasonal sequencing was upheld throughout the Hortus Eystettensis: moving from ‘Classis Verna’ (Primula, etc.) to ‘Classis Aestiva’ (Dianthus and much else) to ‘Classis Autumnalis’ (fruiting tomatoes and peppers, etc., and some succulents) to a small ‘Classis Hyberna’ (Helleborus and Daphne, etc.), which rounded off the year. By contrast, and a century later, Kick’s sense of new ‘perpetual spring’ in the duchess’s stove and album led him to topsy-turvy juxtapositions that seem to convey horticultural potential. Perhaps the duchess was influenced by a widely held, but misguided, belief that even evergreen plants from the tropics might eventually be acclimatized to English winters through the greenhouse. Her guava (Psidium guajava) on folio 47, for example, would merit what John Evelyn called study by ‘experiments’.137See Mark Laird, ‘Parterre, Grove and Flower Garden: European Horticulture and Planting Design in John Evelyn’s Time’, in John Evelyn’s ‘Elysium Britannicum’ and European Gardening, ed. Therese O’Malley and Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1998), 197. In his ‘Elysium Britannicum’, John Evelyn had highlighted a group of seven species with an asterisk — gum arabic, cinnamon, the dragon tree, avocado, sandalwood, sassafras and tamarind. He commented that they might be ‘a stranger with us, but prompting to experiments’. Erroneous as this was, many other tropical, sub-tropical or tender Cape plants at Badminton eventually found a place in the horticulture of ‘bedding out’, for example, Gomphrena globosa. They thus fulfilled the promise of the ‘perpetual spring’ portraiture. Datura stramonium (pl. 92) and Melianthus major on folios 65 and 55, respectively, are now resilient outdoors in England. Indeed, the former, as an annual weed widely naturalized in warmer countries throughout the world, often appears in waste and cultivated ground in the British Isles as a result of the hot summer weather of a changing climate.

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92. Everhard Kick (Kickius), Badminton florilegium, album one (1703–5), fol. 65 (detail), watercolour and bodycolour, heightened with gum, over graphite underdrawing, on vellum, 23 × 16 ¾ in. (58.4 × 42.5 cm). Badminton House. Photograph reproduced with the kind permission of His Grace the Duke of Beaufort

A ‘Stramonium with a purple and white Flower and a sweet scent’ (a sub-species of Datura stramonium) takes centre stage. Beneath it is a cluster of Galanthus nivalis ‘Flore Pleno’ in bloom. This double snowdrop was perhaps forced into bloom in the duchess’s conservatory, or it simply flowered outside in January. Since the artist shows ‘Stramonium’ simultaneously in flower and dropping seeds, he probably completed the composition over a number of months, not just in winter. The mountain-dwelling saxifrage, perched on mound and rock (3 and 4), is Saxifraga paniculata syn. Aizoon. It was clearly grown by the duchess before the received date of introduction: 1731.

A portrait of Aeonium arboreum towards the end of the Kickius album is especially interesting in this regard (pl. 93a), since this species and its cultivars (e.g., ‘Zwartkop’) eventually proved useful in summer bedding out. On folio 62, Kickius adopted a tripartite format to present the Aeonium as a three-branched ‘Sedum’ (rather different from Besler’s presentation of Aeonium on pl. 353 of the Hortus Eystettensis). In turn, the three-stemmed plant forms a trinity with two flanking variegated forms. A Moroccan succulent introduced by 1633, the Aeonium was admired by John Evelyn when he visited Bishop Compton’s Fulham garden on 11 October 1681: ‘in whose Garden I first saw Sedum arborescens in flowre, which was exceeding beautifull’.138Cited in David Jacques and Arend Jan van der Horst, The Gardens of William and Mary (London: Christopher Helm, 1988), 170. Though not in flower at the time of picking, the duchess’s remarkably flattened herbarium specimen also has its leader and two branches (pl. 93b). As in the Kickius portrait, the root system is preserved, and the whole was probably taken apart and reassembled in the pressing (possibly even from several specimens).

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93a. Everhard Kick (Kickius), Badminton florilegium, album one (1703–5), fol. 62, watercolour and bodycolour, heightened with gum, over graphite underdrawing, on vellum, 23 × 16 ¾ in. (58.4 × 42.5 cm). Badminton House. Photograph reproduced with the kind permission of His Grace the Duke of Beaufort

The duchess of Beaufort had an interest in the group she called ‘striped plants’. She listed them in 1691, 1692 and 1699 (and in an undated list of circa 1700). The list of 1699 contains approximately ninety-one plants. Each list varies in numbers as well as species, suggesting that variegated plants were not organized as a collection within the garden, systematically surveyed over time. Rather, miscellany was at the heart of the duchess’s collecting. The striped ‘sedum’ appears on all four lists as a ‘houseleek’. But there is no houseleek to match Kick’s portrait of the chimaera (the golden-blotched variegate, right).

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Description: Strip'd Sedum (now Aeonium arboreum)

93b. ‘Strip’d Sedum’ (now Aeonium arboreum) in the Sloane Herbarium, the duchess of Beaufort’s hortus siccus, HS 135, fol. 14. © The Natural History Museum, London

The duchess recorded a list of ninety-one plants entitled: ‘Stript plants growing att Badminton Sepr the 30th 1699’.139Sloane MS 3349, fols 49–53v. See Jan Woudstra, ‘ “Striped Plants”: The First Collections of Variegated Plants in Late Seventeenth-century Gardens’, Garden History, XXXIV/1 (Summer 2006), 64–79. The list of 1692 is Sloane MS 4070, fols 196–7, that of 1697 is Sloane MS 4071, fols 35–6. Another copy of 1699 is Sloane MS 4071, fols 188–9. Among all her list makings, classification by stripes and mottling indicated very clearly her attempts to bring order, while also noting the anomalous. Unknown to her, a mottling or coloration could arise through unheeded cultural deprivations, notably a deficiency of phosphorus. Thus, on the left of folio 62 there appears an unstable mutant mentioned by Bradley in 1728, a purple variation within the white-edged Aeonium (A. arboreum ‘Albovariegatum’).140See Rowley, ‘The Duchess of Beaufort’s Succulent Plants’, 9. Moreover, the golden-blotched variegate on the right is known only from this one image and from Ray’s reference in 1704 to Sherard’s account of its growing at Badminton. Otherwise unknown in the horticultural literature, it is thus considered today an unstable ‘chimaera’.141Ibid. Chance, in other words, was sometimes chanced upon.

There are chance lapses too: for example, where the same plant turns up in different portraits. On folio 10, for instance, the ‘Sedum’ proves to be the succulent Anacampseros telephiastrum, identical with the ‘Portulaca’ of folio 36. Yet the duchess’s project with Kickius did not lack for overall regimen. This was the legacy of William Sherard’s stint at Badminton. Folio 61 provides an indication of the disciplined scope of that project. Against the dominant plant at the centre, the entry reads: ‘Dr Sherard rec’d from the Prince of Catholica from Sicily 1702 with severall other Seeds 2 berrys of Sebesten. They were rais’d and prosper’d so well that June 1703 two Cuttings were taken off and Feb: 1704/5 one of those Cuttings was four foot three inches and the Body four Inches.’ It appears to be Cordia myxa of Asia, a plant used in traditional medicines.

This was not the only plant prospering under the duchess’s care. The entry on ‘Guava’ (Psidium guajava) on folio 47 shows that the leader had reached 17 feet, close to the maximum capacity of the greenhouse at 18 feet (see again pl. 59). Its fruit was 5 inches across. In fact, the plants in the stove were growing so ‘extravagantly’ that the duchess had some topped to prevent them going through the roof. Kickius painted the ripening yellow fruit of the guava with such relish that its oily fragrance seems to emanate from the page, reflecting its use as rare food at Badminton: ‘Her Grace . . . had them brought to Table fresh from the Tree and some others ripened in Sugar.’142Cited in Jacques and Van der Horst, The Gardens of William and Mary, 176.

The Duchess’s ‘Infirmary’: From Technology to a Human Touch in Stove Cultivation, 1700–1709

A painting of Badminton from the south — long attributed to Thomas Smith but probably by an unknown artist — features the ‘Orringere’ in the right foreground (pl. 94a).143Gloucestershire Record Office, Badminton Papers, D2700 QB 3/2. Approximately 110 feet in length, it backed onto the 18-foot-high wall. A central border with orange trees and other stove plants was accessible from flanking paths heated underneath by four stoves.144Sloane MS 4078, fols 385–6: Badminton, May [1699?], continuation of letter from the duchess of Beaufort to Hans Sloane (see note 77 above), which gives an account of the great conservatory. I am grateful to Margaret Riley for help with this transcription: ‘what a great Con[servatory?] my Lord has made for all Curiositys, beside the Stoves, under a south wall of 18 foot high is a walke of 220 foot long 10 foot broad, the midle is a row of Orreng trees in the ground fill’d up between wth all sorts of stove plants, a border under the wall, halfe of it planted wth Adhatoda Rus Indian Laurell [Justicia adhatoda] &c most of them reach the top of the wall, the other halfe in pots on a shelf & on the ground resembles a hedge, these being [the next word may be ‘almost’, but a whole line is missing] this place has 4 fier places the smoake warming it under 2 paved walks, one that parts the midle from the border under the wall, the other along by the windows & doores, the roofe is halfe glasse the other [‘being next to the wall’ is inserted as an after thought] deale, in manner of window’s to raise, to let in raine & aire in very hott weather, every thing grows extravagently, one plant is now in flower that I fancie has not blowne in England, I have sent you by one of my Lord’s officers that is gone up a sprig dry’d, my Lord’s gardiner haveing a great inclination to drawing I made him draw it, that you might see the manner of it growing, it is time to ease [you/your?] [—] in reading this scribble Yr friend & servant M Beaufort’. The front of the building was articulated by a sequence of four pairs of large windows separated by three doors. Dormer windows in the roof aided ventilation. It was comparable to the ten bays of Magdalena Poulle’s orangery at Gunterstein. The Dutch lady increased the vast glass fenestration, however, by adding two sloping tropical hothouses at each corner (see pl. 53b). Poulle was up on the latest technology — solar heat and subterranean heating — and she had probably put her entrance at the back to avoid draughts. Often two or three rows of notches were added to the windows to make them draught-free. Great care had to be taken in opening and shutting any aperture, as Jan Commelin’s De Nederlandze Hesperides (1676) made clear.145See Wijnands, catalogue entry 136, in The Anglo-Dutch Garden in the Age of William and Mary, ed. Hunt and De Jong, 287. Doubtless during the Great Storm, the duchess had special care taken with doors and windows. After all, within that sanctuary at Badminton, there grew the custard apple (Annona reticulata), the banana (Musa × paradisiaca) and the guava that Maria Sibylla Merian painted from her recollections of Surinam. Here was a taste beyond the candied orange-blossom of Commelin and the tamarind and cinnamon of John Evelyn’s day.

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Description: Badminton from the South, detail by Smith, Thomas

94a. Thomas Smith (attributed), Badminton from the South (detail), circa 1708–10, oil on canvas, 39 ½ × 48 ½ in. (100.3 × 123.2 cm). Badminton House. Photograph reproduced with the kind permission of His Grace the Duke of Beaufort

The best description of the duchess’s conservatory after its refurbishment as a ‘stove’ is provided by her account of 1699 to Hans Sloane. She said that it was ‘made for all Curiositys’. While the Justicia adhatoda of Kickius’s folio 9 grew to the top of the 18-foot-high back wall as a permanent feature (along with guava at 17 feet, see pl. 59), many of the exotics were in pots or tubs that could be moved outside each summer. Everything grew ‘extravagently’. Although she referred to the roof as ‘halfe glasse’, the painting shows only five dormer windows in addition to the eight main windows that aided ventilation. On its west side was the gardener’s house and dovecote.

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94b. Thomas Smith (attributed), Badminton from the South (detail), circa 1708–10, oil on canvas, 39 ½ × 48 ½ in. (100.3 × 123.2 cm). Badminton House. Photograph reproduced with the kind permission of His Grace the Duke of Beaufort

To the left of the dovecote or pigeon-house lay the ‘Mellon garden’. This entrance to Badminton was between that large melon garden and several enclosures, from where the stench of pigsties and the adjoining slaughterhouse wafted over the walls. All were thus reminded, on arrival, of the business of keeping the household fed. As indicated on the 1680s estate plan (see pl. 67), a stable for ‘deseased horses’ dominated this entrance. By 1708–10, however, the painter gave prominence to what had been labelled the ‘ffaulkehner’s house’, showing falcons outside and in front of it.

The painting from the south shows that the duchess’s original ‘greenhouse’ remained largely unchanged from the 110 feet on the estate plan of the 1680s. Unlike Gunterstein, then, there is no indication of separate tropical stoves. Indeed, as noted previously, the signs of etiolation on some succulents in the Kickius album point to cultivation in a single structure that, by underground heat (with some warmth from the sun), created common, but not ideal, conditions for all in this cabinet of living curiosities.146See Rowley, ‘The Duchess of Beaufort’s Succulent Plants’, 3.

The duchess knew of the latest technology well before the 1699 conversion. Hence the absence of tack-on tropical stoves is puzzling; for in 1692 she had received a report on Queen Mary’s new stoves at Hampton Court.147This background is fully covered by Jan Woudstra, ‘ “Much better contrived and built then any other in England”: Stoves and Other Structures for the Cultivation of Exotic Plants at Hampton Court Palace, 1689–1702’, in Technology and the Garden, ed. Lee and Helphand, 79–107 Woudstra describes the Bale report (see notes 67 and 150) as ‘an act of industrial espionage’. He provides a full transcription on pp. 103–4 of his chapter. The Dutch carpenter Hendri(c)k Floris had built these stoves in 1689 at a cost of £113 12s. 3½d., and was granted a gratuity of £2 for the extra effort involved.148See Woudstra, ‘The Re-instatement of the Greenhouse Quarter at Hampton Court Palace’, 82. Christopher Hatton described them as ‘much better contrived and built than any other in England’.149Quoted from Rowley, ‘The Duchess of Beaufort’s Succulent Plants’, 179.

By far the best description is what was sent as the report — ‘ye Queen’s new stoves’ — to the duchess by a servant, John Bale (or Ball), at her Chelsea home, Beaufort House, in September 1692. He reported how three separate ‘stoves’ all faced south. Each was 55 feet long, with 6 feet in between them. The sloping glass front was 8 feet wide at the bottom and 5 feet wide at the top: ‘all ye front is Glass windows, of wch there are 14 Doors to each’. The height of the two end stoves was 10 feet, and the one at the centre was 12 feet (to allow for taller plants). A shed ran along the back wall (which was two bricks deep), and this allowed the gardeners to tend the underfloor heating. To tend the individual plants (on four shelves and on the ground), it was necessary to have each glass door open. They opened back-to-back and shutters were provided too. The plants requiring the greatest heat were placed on the floor.

There were four fireplaces at intervals along the 55 feet (roughly corresponding to the 5:80 and the 3:36 ratio in Amsterdam). They were covered by the ‘iron doore & frame’. The gardeners would set a fire of oak logs or ‘billets’ in a ‘wagon’ or grate on four wheels. They could push and pull the wagon into the vault by ‘an Iron Crook’.150See here Jacques and Van der Horst, The Gardens of William and Mary, 179–80. Sloane MS 4062, fol. 246, 1 September 1692. I am grateful to Margaret Riley for helping me with the transcription, and to Jan Woudstra for providing the best interpretation of the original text. The heat was transmitted through iron plates overlaid with sand and brick tiles. Great care was taken to reduce smoke that could ‘spoyle’ plants, including the turn of the smokestack over the shed and away from the glass case. Every two fires shared a chimney, and smoke, passing through flues, probably aided the heating.151This is Jan Woudstra’s interpretation in ‘ “much better contrived and built then any other in England” ’, since Bale was unable to detect the construction of the chimneys. Boards were closely ‘rabbitted’ (i.e., rabbetted in tongue-and-groove joinery to exclude smoke) and then painted white to show, by smoke discoloration, what needed mending. Holes at both ends of each case aided a moderate cross-ventilation.

It seems likely (though not certain) that the duchess discarded the glass of the Hampton Court model, while also overlooking or rejecting Evelyn’s technological advance (his method of external heating to reduce the pollution that caused plant ‘sicknesses’, in the Kalendarium hortense of 1691; see pl. 54b).152See again Laird, ‘ “Perpetual Spring” or Tempestuous Fall’, 158–64. Her reference in the letter to Sloane of May 1699 to both a ‘Conservatory’ and ‘Stoves’ leaves much unexplained.153The account she gave to Sloane in May 1699 — ‘a great Con[servatory?] my Lord has made for all Curiositys, beside the stoves’ (Sloane MS 4078, fol. 386) — raises the question of whether separate ‘stoves’ were in use, which do not appear in the ‘Smith’ paintings of circa 1708–10. What is certain is that she had four subterranean fires and, together, they appear to have worked wonders. Using her skill to bring succour to plants in ill health, she knew how to get the best out of the technology first developed in England at Chelsea Physic Garden in the mid-1680s. In her ‘Infirmary’ (whatever that referred to), she also employed an old woman gardener as her ward nurse: Mary or Martha Marsh.154By 1703 the duchess’s gardener was Isaac Marsh. In the Great Badminton parish records, a ‘Mary Bennet’ was married to an ‘Isacke Marsh’ in 1669. Hence it is possible that, thirty-four years later, ‘Martha’ was the by then ‘old’ wife to the duchess’s gardener. See Sloane MS 3321, fol. 115, in which the gardener Adams writes to Petiver on 17 March 1703 about Martha and Isaac Marsh. It seems likely that she followed the duchess in her banishment to Beaufort House in Chelsea in 1709. See Royal Society, Sherard MS 254, fol. 455, 24 May 1714, Hans Sloane writing to William Sherard: ‘the Dutchesse of Beaufort still laboures with Martha Marfling’. I am very grateful to Margaret Riley for this information. She relied on a human touch as much as on technology in her ‘Matchless Stoves’.155The ‘nursing touch’ as green-fingers knowledge is explored in Laird, ‘Greenhouse Technologies and Horticulture’, 69.

The fact that the three glass cases at Hampton Court had to be replaced after twelve years may point to some technological failure. When Christopher Hatton visited in 1690, ‘400 rare Indian plantes’ had been praised as nonpareils, and in the 1690s the collection expanded with the help of George London and James Reed, among others. The catalogue of 1690 already implied sequencing by cultural habits.156Woudstra, ‘much better contrived and built then any other in England’, 94. And yet it appears that the collection of tropical plants was not faring too well at Hampton Court by 1700; such reports could have influenced the duchess’s decision to stick with a more limited refurbishment.157Woudstra, ‘The Re-instatement of the Greenhouse Quarter at Hampton Court Palace’, 82. By 1701 the construction in the ‘Mellon Garden’ at Hampton Court of a new greenhouse — also referred to as ‘the new Infirmary’ — could also indicate a special hospital for tropical plants.158Woudstra, ‘ “much better contrived and built then any other in England” ’, 95. Whether the duchess received intelligence of Hampton Court’s new glass case of 1701 (approximately 61 × 14 feet in dimension, with five plant stages and a novel flue system, cf. pl. 54a) is unknown. By that time, in any case, it was too late, for she had already worked out what she could do successfully within the ‘Infirmary’, stoves and conventional conservatory.

‘Storys of Plants’: From Estate Management to Managing Herself

Whereas floral and faunal collecting-grounds dominate the foreground of the ‘Smith’ painting from the south, the humdrum workings of the estate are viewed from the north (again long attributed to Thomas Smith, but probably by an unknown artist, pl. 95). Though apparently commissioned by the 2nd duke as he took control in 1708–10, both paintings provide a pendant vision to the Kick album and to the estate map of the 1680s. (Divergences in layout from the Kip and Knyff views suggest that the duke developed the pleasure ground in new ways, along with his considerable architectural alterations, all of which are beyond the discussion here.)

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Description: Badminton from the North, detail by Smith, Thomas

95. Thomas Smith (attributed), Badminton from the North (detail), circa 1708–10, oil on canvas, 23 × 30 in. (58.4 × 76.2 cm). Badminton House. Photograph reproduced with the kind permission of His Grace the Duke of Beaufort

The heart of Badminton as a self-sufficient estate is apparent in the various outbuildings and courts just to the west of the great house (see pl. 96): a grand barn within the rickyard alongside a turkey yard; a pond near the laundry with its drying yard; the woodyard; the stable court with stables; and a whole array of smaller units dedicated to poultry-raising, baking, brewing, carpentry, joinery, plumbing and slaughtering. New features — notably the new dairy by William Killigrew near the pond — show the transition around 1708–10 to control by the dowager duchess’s grandson, the 2nd duke of Beaufort.

Despite the appearance of William Killigrew’s new dairy (which dates from after her departure), the scope of the duchess’s estate management while in residence is brought to life by the view. To the west lies the woodyard and its lean-to sheds for joiner, chandler, soap-maker, carpenter and plumber. There is a drying yard attached to the pond and laundry and next to the turkey yard; and beyond them is the rickyard with its magnificent barn and oxen stalls. To the west lie the handsome ‘exedra’ dog kennels. Further south, a new estate village forms a counterpoint to the parkland avenues beyond. Built by Killigrew, these buildings represent the changing face of Badminton under the young 2nd duke.159See Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England: Gloucestershire: The Cotswolds, 3rd edn, rev. David Verey and Alan Brooks (London: Penguin Books for the Buildings Book Trust, 1999), 388. Despite these changes, estate life is detailed in a way that was surely close to the duchess’s everyday experience. She superintended the making of everything: from soap to candles, to the duke’s ale that came from the malt that was ‘sun-dried upon the leads of his house’.160See Amanda Vickery, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 13, 160. She shows how Badminton sustained the pattern of large Stuart rural households, in which self-sufficient production significantly balanced new consumption, making the duchess like an ‘army colonel’ in charge of troops. In contrast to these various, rather homely cameos, Danckerts’s view from the north (circa 1670; pl. 96), portraying the symmetry of the resplendent architecture in its landscape, plays down these mundane modalities. His grand vision was of the duke’s expansive realm — what the duchess had to master, politically and economically, to become mistress of the house.

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Description: A View Towards the North Front of Badminton House, Gloucestershire by Danckerts,...

96. Hendrik Danckerts (circa 1625–1680), A View Towards the North Front of Badminton House, Gloucestershire, circa 1670 (indistinctly signed and dated 166?), oil on canvas, 71 × 69 in. (180.3 × 175.3 cm). Belvoir Castle, Leicestershire. By kind permission of His Grace the Duke of Rutland. Photo: courtesy of John Harris

This painting has long held significance for what it tells the historian about the architecture and landscaping by the marquess of Worcester circa 1670. It also documents estate management under the watchful eye of his superintending wife — on her way to becoming the duchess of Beaufort in 1682. The features labelled nos. 40–55 on the estate plan of the 1680s (see pl. 70) appear in this view and in the view attributed to Thomas Smith of circa 1708–10. A functional continuity is thus apparent over four decades. Notable, alongside the woodyard, is a long building that housed the joiner, soap boiler, chandler, carpenter and plumber (whose work is apparent from the chimneys).

And yet, a closer viewing of Danckerts’s painting reveals how much of the core of the self-sufficient estate was already in place by 1670. Indeed, the estate plan of the 1680s can be used to verify Danckerts’s depiction (compare again pls 67a and 70). While the Kip and Knyff views marginalize the service side of the estate in favour of representational features, Danckerts meticulously shows the workings of the woodyard. Most significantly, Kip and Knyff’s elimination of outbuildings along the west side of the grass forecourt (forty-nine to fifty-five on the 1680s estate plan) deceives the viewer, who is drawn instead to the eye-catching ideal of the fountains. By contrast, Danckerts faithfully records the outbuilding and the woodyard in a way that does not detract from a unified, symmetrical composition that is staged with great Baroque élan.

In the ‘Smith’ painting from the south, the eye is immediately drawn to the duchess’s other realm: the stove that was the centre of her collecting grounds (pl. 94b). Behind the incongruent façade of the old manor (which backed on to the back of the north front), and alongside the churchyard, lay a grove of dwarf trees. From there, the eye wanders downwards to the pheasants and ostriches that strut in their twin enclosures; thence to the six large beds of the melon-garden enclosure; and thence to the prancing figures of those ‘tame foxes’. Finally, the eye comes to rest on the white doves that perch on the pigeon house and the roof of the gardener’s house to its side. In this conglomeration, the ‘Orringere’ appears almost as imposing as the house itself. But the painter could not show everything. Concealed by the gardener’s house lay the enclosure for guinea pigs. Concealed by the pigeon house was the physic garden, where the duchess first gardened for remedies.

It might all appear Edenic, except that this entrance was placed near the stable for ‘deseased horses’, the ‘ffaulkehner’s house’ and the ‘slaughter house’. Disease and death, always around the corner, were matter-of-fact realities. In letters ahead of the 1st duke’s death in January 1700, the duchess slipped easily with her correspondent Sloane from sickness to plant lore. Before her account of the new conservatory in May 1699, her husband’s ‘stomack’, ‘purge’ and ‘spleen’ are foremost in the exchange with Sloane, her physician.161Sloane MS 4078, fol. 385. The duke’s spleen forms a preamble to dried plants in another letter of 10 July [1699?]. The duchess also wrote of her concern for her daughter, duchess of Ormonde. She entrusted the care to Sloane: ‘I have so much confidence in yr care of her, (besides yr skill) that I thinke her as safe as if I were there my selfe.’162Sloane MS 4061, fols 25–6. Then she turned to her indifferent success in nurturing the seeds he had sent her: ‘I cannot brag of the number that I have rais’d from the Colledg.’ This was followed by the account of topping the guava in the ‘orengree’ during the ‘hot summer’. The letter concludes with a gift of venison sent to Sloane at the Bell Savage Inn on Ludgate Hill. It was doubtless cured in the little house labelled ‘ye Keepers house to break up deer in’. The duchess, who depended on Sloane for physic and botany, signed off as ‘Yr affect friend & servant’ (in contrast to ‘your very humble servant’ used on occasion): ‘When I get into storys of plants I know not how to get out, but it is high time for mee to remember how much better things I may keep you from by reading this scribble, perhaps from my daughter of Ormond for whose health I am so much concern’d.’

PART II
Second Nature: The Care of Plants and Butterflies

The letter of 10 July [1699?] was not the only time the duchess of Beaufort presented her amateur nursing ‘care’ as equal to the professional ‘skill’ of a physician; indeed, near the end of her life, she had a similar exchange with Dr John Radcliffe. Early on, she had applied ‘nursing care’ to herself — a care that became second nature; for it seems likely that she was suffering from maudlin moods in her mid-thirties and mid-forties. She began to cultivate plants as herbal remedies, thus acquiring more than the rudiments of physic. In the 1670s she asked her husband Henry to dispatch tinctures from London. From Montpellier, her son Charles sent ‘little red berries’. They were for ‘the famous confection of Alchermes, an excellent cordial for melancholic and languishing persons’.163Cited in McClain, Beaufort, 119. These were in fact galls from Quercus coccifera, Kermes oak, which resembled berries.

If physic launched her gardening in the 1660s and 1670s, it may also account for kinships within the Kickius album three decades later — relationships that have more to do with emblematic knowledge than the new systems of John Ray. In short, horticulture as a regenerative activity was first employed out of necessity. Then, as a second stage, the duchess perfected it as gardening craft. And then, in a third stage by extension, that green-fingers knowledge was directed to nurturing butterflies — a preoccupation of her final years. From the age of seventy-nine to eighty-five, drawing upon fifty years of self-administering physic, she turned that second nature into patronage. The duchess thereby helped to raise a butterfly man — Eleazar Albin — within a culture of insects furthered by two remarkable virtuosic women: the incomparable Maria Sibylla Merian and the ingenious Eleanor Glanville.

A mouldy spell had first surfaced in the early 1660s, when, as a young woman learning to contend with household management, Mary made embarrassing mistakes: sending a Badminton cheese to Lady Southampton that spoiled in its carriage.164Ibid., 56. For all that, she redeemed herself ably, controlling finances as the ‘superintendent’ of the estate. In the mid-1690s, when she was sixty-five, the afflictions of her thirties and forties returned. By then, she was managing the household at Badminton by weekly accounting. She wrote of having so much business: ‘now I have skillets upon the fire in the stillhouse and affairs to order this fine day in the garden’.165Badminton Muniments Room, FME 4/1/18. Cited in McClain, Beaufort, 198. Servants were under surveillance: ‘No fault of order was passed by; for it may be concluded there are enough of them that pass undiscovered.’166North, The Lives, 273.

Making herbal remedies, managing a household, nurturing a family and teaching needlework to daughters, all these were the conventional accomplishments of her gender. As Sir Robert Filmer had opined in his posthumous Patriarcha (1680), skill in ‘physic and surgery’ brought ‘nobility to women, as arms and learning do to men’; and even a century later, Jane Jenkin of Whitton was described as ‘a very knowing woman with the sick and wounded’.167See Keith Thomas, The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 102, 170–71. Yet, self-taught and self-cured, the duchess went much further: to see the edifying power that any individual could find in any handy pursuit. In a world without universal schooling, the duchess grasped how artists could emerge from ranks low as well as high.

The strongly meritocratic strain in educational thought from the sixteenth century onwards was moving towards an Enlightenment ideal of a social order based on achievement, not ascription.168Ibid., 31–4. While the duchess ruled her estate autocratically, and was not one to acknowledge a servant’s right to move above his station, in an increasingly mobile society she saw advantages in being allied to those of talent. Indeed, the fact that her gardener George Adams was trying his hand as a limner (amateur botanical artist) involved alliances of self-fashioning that underpinned the early years of widowhood. The interlude with the professional artist Kick then gave way to the amateur alliances that defined the years after Kick’s departure from Badminton in 1705.

The duchess appears to have been familiar with Richard Waller’s botanical drawings of English plants, and, through Sloane and Kick, she must have developed an appreciation of what distinguished amateur from professional art. Yet a limner could rework amateurish essays into professional masterpieces. Alexander Marshal, for example, described by his contemporary Samuel Hartlib as ‘a Merchant by profession . . . one of the greatest Florists’, had learned his art by copying Old Masters.169Prudence Leith-Ross, The Florilegium of Alexander Marshal (London: The Royal Collection, 2000), 7. An untutored amateur artist, he succeeded in rising close to the pinnacle — the masterful works of Daniel Rabel and Nicolas Robert. Both his natural history drawings and still-life paintings are of equal distinction (pl. 97). Richard Waller of the Royal Society had shown a limner’s talent in his paintings of English native flowers, bringing advanced science and the new microscope technologies to aid representation. By contrast, the duchess had floral embroidery and herbal lore as her accomplishments, and, unlike her sister Elizabeth, never dabbled in fine art. It was perhaps a logical step to believe that there were no obstacles to natural learning, no handicaps for her sex, none even for the artisans around her, whatever their station in the rigid hierarchy of ‘200 persons’ that made up the full ‘family’ of Badminton. Gardening was a meritocratic calling in which women and textile workers and plain gardeners alike could excel as florists. The duchess knew this from John Mansfield and William Oram at Beaufort House.

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Description: Flowers in a Delft Jar by Marshal, Alexander

97. Alexander Marshal, Flowers in a Delft Jar, 1663; oil on panel, 12 × 16 in. (30.5 × 40.5 cm). Paul Mellon Collection, Yale Center for British Art

Bishop Compton’s garden in Fulham, which furnished the duchess with American plants, also allowed Marshal to finish the watercolours of the Windsor florilegium (from 1675 to 1682), thus ensuring his place among distinguished English amateur flower painters, both in oils and watercolours. This oil painting shows the auriculas and carnations favoured by the duchess of Beaufort in her Chelsea garden in the 1680s and 1690s. After Kickius’s departure from Badminton in 1705, the duchess turned to amateurs for the second album of the Badminton florilegium — Daniel Frankcom, Henrietta London and an anonymous Lepidoptera artist. Some folios were dedicated to auriculas, which the duchess of Beaufort cultivated again on her return to Chelsea during the banishment of 1709–15.

Hence it was intelligible that she employed the ‘old woman’, Mary or Martha Marsh, to manage the stove. While the duke was still alive, she relied totally on her ‘Lords Gardiner’ (plain George Adams), ennobling him as scribe and would-be artist. Thus, by extension, she encouraged Daniel Frankcom, the under-footman, and Henrietta London, daughter of a nurseryman, to paint alongside the best, however miserable the results. There might have been some ploy in this intimate alliance of aristocrat and artisan (following the ‘admirable and easy’ mode of governing the servants), but the duchess knew when to co-opt professional help and when to fall back on her own skills. She would prove herself, albeit hampered by lack of Latin, quite competent to steer her way through botanical, horticultural and entomological matters. Though her written English was at times as faltering or quirky as that of a plain gardening operative, her intellect was quick and incisive. Like many exceptional women of her generation, the care of a butterfly, like the care of a guava, came as second nature.

It was the duchess who told Richard Bradley that every species of butterfly and moth has its own special food plant. Like Maria Sibylla Merian, she understood those dependencies by raising butterflies. In 1721 — six years after her death — Richard Bradley wrote: ‘I believe [she] has bred a greater variety of English Insects, than were ever rightly observ’d by any one Person in Europe.’170Cited in David Elliston Allen, The Naturalist in Britain: A Social History [1976] (2nd edn, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 24. Given the equivalent praise from Petiver, Sherard and Sloane, this appears a trustworthy account, for Bradley knew her skill with succulents. Though a self-taught woman, she clearly outdid many professional men, and she was not alone. Applied butterfly studies — later the science of the aurelian or lepidopterist — owe much to foundational work done by women either side of the North Sea.

Some time between 1720 and 1742 (and probably in 1738, perhaps as an offshoot of botanical ‘clubs’ like the Temple Coffee House group of chapter 3), those with a craze for ‘flys’ — bath white and painted lady — founded the Society of Aurelians. It is commemorated in the charming dedication in Benjamin Wilkes’s Twelve New Designs of English Butterflies of 1742 (pl. 98). In the Augustan age, the Aurelians were men who, taking the Latin aureolus to refer to the gilt-decorated chrysalides of certain nymphalid butterflies, dressed themselves up in the ‘boyish, mock-heroic’ garb of club membership.171See here the account in Michael A. Salmon, The Aurelian Legacy: British Butterflies and their Collectors (Colchester: Harley Books, 2000), 30–31 and 398, where circa 1738 is given as a more precise founding date. The activities of the group were predicated not merely on the work of William Vernon and James Petiver (or the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society of 1710),172Ibid., 27 and 397. but on the doings of three women who independently took an untrodden path on the margins of social and scientific orthodoxy. This is where the story of the duchess takes on a different complexion, because she accomplished so much as an octogenarian widow. She had been ostracized at Badminton from 1709, when a suit was filed in Chancery against the dowager duchess by her children, demanding the distribution of the balance of the late duke’s personal estate. Her work with butterflies was an achievement in banishment.

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Description: Twelve New Designs of English Butterflies, dedication page by Wilkes, Benjamin

98. Benjamin Wilkes, Twelve New Designs of English Butterflies (London, 1742), dedication page, etched and engraved, 13 ⅞ × 11 ⅜ in. (35.4 × 29 cm). British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings (1914, 0520.522) © Trustees of The British Museum

Benjamin Wilkes’s elaborate dedication in his Twelve New Designs (1742) provides the earliest known reference to the Society of Aurelians, the world’s first learned society devoted specifically to entomology. Their work took advantage of studies by three ‘butterfly women’: Maria Sibylla Merian, Eleanor Glanville and the duchess of Beaufort herself. The puss moth larva (Cerura vinula, top right) on its nibbled willow presents an image of the species similar to that in the second album of the Badminton florilegium (see pl. 106, and see also pl. 11 of Eleazar Albin’s Natural History, 1720, pl. 107).

Maria Sibylla Merian has already found her place in history, commemorated for her art, her science and her extraordinary life as a woman (pl. 99).173See here Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Metamorphoses’, in Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-century Lives (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1995), 140–202; Kurt Wettengl, ed., Maria Sibylla Merian, 1647–1717: Artist and Naturalist (Ostfildern: Gerd Hatje, 1998); Katharina Schmidt-Loske, Die Tierwelt der Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717): Arten, Beschreibungen und Illustrationen (Marburg: Basilisken-Presse, 2007); and Ella Reitsma, Maria Sibylla Merian and Daughters: Women of Art and Science (Zwolle: Waanders, 2008); Brigitte Wirth, ‘Maria Sibylla Merian, Baltasar Scheid und Richard Bradley: die Künstlerin und Naturforscherin, ein Kaufmann und ein Botaniker’, Annals of the History and Philosophy of Biology, XII (2007), 115–53. See also Florence F. J. M. Pieters and Diny Winthagen, ‘Maria Sibylla Merian, Naturalist and Artist (1647–1717): A Commemoration on the Occasion of the 350th Anniversary of her Birth’, Archives of Natural History, XXVI/1 (April 1999), 1–18; Kay Etheridge and Florence F. J. M. Pieters, ‘Maria Sibylla Merian: Pioneering Naturalist, Artist and Inspiration for Catesby’, in The Curious Mister Catesby, ed. Nelson and Elliott. Along with her volumes on European caterpillars, Merian’s book on New World organisms — Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium (1705) — changed the way in which the natural world was perceived and portrayed, thereby anticipating ecology. In her lifetime, she published on the life cycles and habits of more than 250 species of insects and their relationship to plants. She was one of the earliest naturalists to write about butterflies and moths in terms of defensive behaviour, locomotion and myriad aspects of larval and adult development.174Etheridge and Pieters, ‘Maria Sibylla Merian’, [forthcoming].

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Description: Citron with a Moth and a Harlequin Beetle by Merian, Maria Sibylla

99. Maria Sibylla Merian, Citron with a Moth and a Harlequin Beetle, circa 1701–2, watercolour, touched with bodycolour and with pen and grey ink on vellum, 14 ⅜ × 10 ¾ in. (36.6 × 27.5 cm). British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings (56, 5275.28) © Trustees of The British Museum

In 1699, aged fifty-two and with the encouragement and financial assistance of scientists and intellectuals, Maria Sibylla Merian set off with her daughter Dorothea for a two-year sojourn in the Dutch colony of Surinam. Her Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium came out in Latin and Dutch in 1705. A copy made its way into the library of the duchess of Beaufort at Badminton, where the under-footman Daniel Frankcom was being tutored by Kickius. The duchess’s second album contains sixteen copies from Merian. This extraordinary three-dimensional study was not among those copied by Frankcom.

Eleanor Glanville (née Goodricke) was just as remarkable in a parochial way. She lived at Tickenham Court, the other side of Bristol from the duchess at Badminton. On her father’s death in 1666, Eleanor had been left the estates that her mother had brought to the marriage in 1652 and was thus a very rich woman in her own right. It was her second husband’s bid to wrest this fortune from her that drove her to distraction and led to a contested will on her death. Described as ‘the ingenious Lady Glanvil’ in Moses Harris’s The Aurelian (1766), she reared butterflies and moths. She may have been the first to refer to geometrid larvae as ‘loopers’;175Salmon, The Aurelian Legacy, 106–7. and, in one of the first detailed accounts, she raised and observed the early stages of the high brown fritillary (Argynnis adippe) and green-veined white (Pieris napi). One of her contemporaries, a John Brewton, observed, just as attentively as a naturalist, the nature of Glanville’s work: how ‘she and her two female apprentice girls would carry a sheet out under the hedges and bushes and with a long pole beat the said hedges and catch’t a parcel of wormes’.176Ibid., 107. They doubtless carried a collecting tin — the ‘vasculum’ first recorded in 1704.177Allen, The Naturalist in Britain, 4. (Butterfly nets were known only a year or two after Glanville’s death when Petiver returned from the Dutch Republic in 1711 with a ‘muscipula’ or ‘flycatcher’).178Salmon, The Aurelian Legacy, 69. As John Ray vouched, a stick and large net were enough to catch a butterfly in flight. Whether Eleanor Glanville’s collections came from captive or wild specimens, the same stealthy death awaited the unsuspecting creature. Petiver explained how insects should be killed, by ‘gently crushing their head & body between yr fingers which will prevent their fluttering’.179Cited in ibid., 61. Pinching the thorax and impaling the butterfly on a pin meant that Glanville wore a pincushion around her neck like a medallion on a ribbon.180Ibid., 65.

Collecting insects had become an obsession soon after separating from her husband, Richard Glanville, in 1698. She paid servants to collect specimens in folded papers — 6d. per specimen — or even 1s. for a special butterfly and caterpillar. Three specimens that Eleanor Glanville gave to Petiver, a butterfly and two moths, have been preserved in the Sloane Collection in the Natural History Museum in London. But most of her ‘noble’ collections perished, and much of her distinction as an accomplished observer of butterflies was lost in the process. Even in her lifetime, as Glanville wrote to Petiver, mites had got into her cabinet and eaten up a hundred of her best specimens. Petiver himself preserved many of his specimens between thin sheets of mica. These were bound with gummed paper or placed in shallow wooden frames like a lantern slide (pl. 100). That method appeared preferable to the alternative one, which Petiver described in his ‘Directions’: a pressing of specimens. Leonard Plukenet thus pressed butterflies like the flowers of the duchess’s hortus siccus. The Revd Adam Buddle would follow the same mode between 1699 and 1715. A brimstone and small copper flit in a desiccated path around the equally dry grasses of folio 10 in volume XII of his hortus siccus (pl. 101), now in the Sloane Herbarium, HS 125.

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Description: Lantern slide of the brown hairstreak (Thecla betulae) by Petiver, James

100. James Petiver, lantern slide of the brown hairstreak (Thecla betulae), 1702. © The Natural History Museum, London

This is probably the oldest specimen of the brown hairstreak (Thecla betulae) in existence. It once belonged to James Petiver and was taken near Croydon on the last day of August 1702. Petiver preserved many of his specimens between thin sheets of mica. These were bound with gummed paper or placed in shallow wooden frames like a lantern slide. That slide method appeared preferable to the alternative, which Petiver described in his ‘Directions’: a pressing of specimens like plants in a hortus siccus. While the duchess of Beaufort never kept pressed butterflies within her hortus siccus, she bred a vast number of English ‘Insects’, as Richard Bradley documented in 1721.

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Description: Hortus siccus, vol. XII, fol. 10 by Buddle, Adam

101. The Revd Adam Buddle, Hortus siccus, vol. XII, fol. 10, circa 1699–1715, now Sloane Herbarium, HS 125. © The Natural History Museum, London

The Revd Adam Buddle pressed the brimstone (Gonepteryx rhamni) and the small copper (Lycaena phlaeas) and incorporated them into his hortus siccus. The herbarium also includes some grasses (Gramen), classified by the works of Bauhin and Ray. Such Lepidoptera specimens were probably collected around London between 1699 and 1715. The end of that period coincided with the years of the duchess of Beaufort’s banishment to Beaufort House, Chelsea (1709–15), where she found a final road to fulfilment through pressing and cataloguing plants and through raising live butterflies.

This is a striking representation of how the pictorial world of grasses in Richard Waller’s album at the Royal Society overlaps with the doings of other amateur naturalists of his time. As a more explicit link, sixteen of Frankcom’s drawings in the second album of the Badminton florilegium are copies from Merian’s Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium of 1705, which immediately made its way into the duchess’s library at Badminton. Since Frankcom was being trained to paint by Kickius, these drawings appear to date from just after the completion of the first album in summer 1705.181See Sloane MS 4061, fol. 1: a letter to Sloane after Kickius’s departure, dated ‘Feb the 19’ (1706–8?), in which she writes: ‘I am busy wth my dry’d plants, if I had a good assistant I believe I could make a Catal of 2000 plants . . . one of my footmen learn’t a little to paint of Keke, hee has made a shift to paint some Aloes that have bloome since the other went from hence.’ Merian’s work was thus an incubator to the second album of the duchess’s florilegium, yet an overlapping of activities began two years earlier. In the stormy season of 1703 (with very high winds on 12 November presaging those of 27 November), the three women’s divergent pursuits can be seen to converge around James Petiver, the greatest ‘networker’ of his time.

A Web of Life and Death: Three Butterfly Women and Metamorphosis

As trees fell around them in the Great Storm of November 1703, each of the three women naturalists was assembling a picture of the natural world. However discrete these pursuits, all three were linked to James Petiver of the club at the Temple Coffee House in London: Eleanor Granville wrote to him in December 1702, offering a sample of 100 preserved butterflies; Maria Sibylla Merian contacted him by letters dated June 1703 to April 1704 with some business propositions; and it was on 16 January 1703 that Petiver wrote in the ‘Abstract’ of his collections of the ‘Perfection’ of cultivation achieved by the duchess in her ‘Matchless Stoves’.182James Petiver, Musei Petiveriani . . . , ‘An Abstract’ (London, 16 January 1703), 94. ‘In her Grace the DUCHESS of BEAUFORTS most Noble Garden and Matchless Stoves at Badminton in Gloucestershire, I the last Summer met with many New, Rare and very Curious Plants, most of them raised to that Perfection I never saw before!’ He had dedicated to the duchess of Beaufort table III of his Gazophylacii naturae & artis of 1702, which followed the dedication to Bishop Compton of table II. The duchess’s dedicated plate included illustrations of an ‘elegant Moth I first received from Mary-land and since from Carolina’, a ‘rare and beautiful Fly’ from India (comparable to that which ‘the late worthy Mr. Charlton’ [William Courten, d. 1702] ‘caught about Mompelier’), a black butterfly ‘Paplio GUINEENSIS nigrescens’, and a locust from the Cape of Good Hope.183James Petiver, Gazophylacii naturae & artis decas prima . . . (London, 1702).

The year 1703, in short, happened to be an auspicious year for butterfly enthusiasts. In a letter to a friend, written in 1703, William Vernon mentioned a chance meeting in London with Eleanor Glanville. At her home, Tickenham Court near Clevedon, nestled by a line of hills in north Somerset, Glanville pursued her domestic passion for entomology. William Vernon — an active if occasional participant in the Temple Coffee House gatherings in London — was amazed to discover that a West Country woman had ‘the noblest collection of butterflies, all English’. Indeed, as he added, its completeness ‘sham’d us’.184Salmon, The Aurelian Legacy, 107.

On 28 December 1702 Eleanor Glanville had already taken the initiative to write to James Petiver. She was sending him ‘a 100 several species, such as they are, many comon, & many very smal but some I belive wil prove new, except you have got them lattly’.185Ibid., 339–42. Among the new ones (whether in this or some other package of 1702) was a butterfly that became known as ‘The Glanvil Fretillary’. Because she had collected it near Lincoln, James Petiver named it the ‘Lincoln-shire Fritillary’ in his Gazophylacii naturae & artis of 1703. It was left to James Dutfield to reinstitute the honorary name ‘Glanville’ (pl. 102). Today, this butterfly, still called the Glanville fritillary (Melitaea cinxia), has vanished from Lincoln and all mainland Britain.186See Jim Asher et al., The Millennium Atlas of Butterflies in Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 236–9. In its refuge on the Isle of Wight today, however, it still feeds on ribwort plantain (Plantago lanceolata), just as James Dutfield’s portrait of 1748–9 had shown.

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Description: A New and Complete Natural History of English Moths and Butterflies, pl. 5 by...

102. James Dutfield, A New and Complete Natural History of English Moths and Butterflies (London, 1748–9), pl. 5. © The Natural History Museum, London

One of James Dutfield’s few butterfly portraits is this magnificent plate of ‘The Glanvil Fretillary’ (Melitaea cinxia) and its correct food plant, ribwort plantain (Plantago lanceolata). It is shown along with ‘The Wood Lady, or Prince of Orange Butterfly’ (the orange tip, Anthocharis cardamines). Dutfield obtained this Glanville fritillary — named after Eleanor Glanville — from a wood near Dulwich, in Surrey. It was a well-known locality for the butterfly, which was also found northwards to Lincolnshire. Today, the species is confined to coastal landslips in the south of the Isle of Wight and on the Channel Islands.

Precisely what Maria Sibylla Merian, the most celebrated butterfly woman of her age, was doing when the storm lashed Amsterdam appears undocumented. (She made no reference to it, although Albert Seba [1665–1736], writing to J. G. Volkamer II in Nuremberg, noted that ‘most of the houses’ were ‘damaged’ in Amsterdam.)187I am very grateful to Florence Pieters and Brigitte Wirth for researching this, and for providing the transcription of Seba’s letter dated 11 December 1703, in which he refers to the ‘great stormy wind’ of 8 December (Gregorian, corresponding to 27 November in the Julian calendar, see Introduction). It opens with the statement: ‘Hier ist sonderlich nächstes Notabels voorgefallen als ds wir den achten dieses alhier einen großen Sturm windt haben auß gestanden, und die meisten Häuser beschädiget’. In letters to James Petiver, dated 4 June, 20 June, 5 October 1703 and ‘April 1704’, respectively, Merian turns up as a businesswoman or entrepreneur. The letter of 5 October 1703 — the month before the Great Storm — is especially interesting.188Sloane MS 4063, fol. 214. In all these, she was addressing pecuniary matters and marketing advantage: sales of her specimens; subscribers for her forthcoming book; perhaps a dedication to Queen Anne, ‘coming from a woman to a personage of the same sex’.189Zemon, Women on the Margins, 178.

It is clear from a letter of 17 September 1706, written by Petiver to Merian, how his support went back to his first acquaintance with her earlier work, Der Raupen (1679 onwards). What developed in 1703–4, as Petiver responded to her request for subscribers, was a reciprocal ‘friendship’; by April 1704 Merian had enough subscribers to complete her work, partly due to Petiver’s help.190T. Kinukawa, ‘Natural History as Entrepreneurship: Maria Sibylla Merian’s Correspondence with J. G. Volkamer II and James Petiver’, Archives of Natural History, XXXVIII/2 (2011), 313–27. In effect, Petiver saw Merian and other female correspondents as informants for his own project. It was quite otherwise with Johann Georg Volkamer of Nuremberg. To him she had already made her intentions perfectly clear by October 1702: she would paint ‘in perfection on vellum’ what she had brought back from America; her copper engravings required a large format to capture the winged life cycles of Surinam.191Zemon, Women on the Margins, 178. Yet, in contrast to Petiver’s enthusiasm, Volkamer, in his ‘unequal’ and ‘patronizing’ relationship to Merian, proved lukewarm in the efforts to find German subscribers. Hence, after writing to him that ‘patienta is a good little herb’, Merian abandoned hopes of a German translation and published in Dutch and Latin only.192Kinukawa, ‘Natural History as Entrepreneurship’, 318–20.

On 18 June 1701 Merian had returned from Paramaribo to Amsterdam with her daughter Dorothea. She had spent almost two years in the colony, observing caterpillars, chrysalises and all flying things, in both gardens and forests. On board ship were rolled vellum paintings, dried butterflies, bottles with snake and lizard eggs, bulbs, chrysalises that had not yet opened, and many round boxes full of pressed insects for sale.193Personal communication from Florence Pieters (24 January 2014): ‘The museum of Wiesbaden has a collection of butterflies dating back to Merian’s time and several of these are proven to be the real MODELS for her plates in Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium.’ See Joos van de Plas, Second Life: Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium Revisited (Wiesbaden: Museum Wiesbaden, 2013). These would form the material basis for the Metamorphosis, producing a vision of violent as well as harmonious nature. Plate 18, for example, shows cycles of predation and reproduction: spiders, a cockroach, ants and a dead hummingbird on a guava tree (pl. 103). It illuminated the world of tropical arthropods in a ground-breaking, microcosmic vision of nature. The long accompanying text describes the migratory foraging raids of army ants, and the ability of leaf-cutter ants to defoliate a tree overnight.194See Kay Etheridge, ‘Maria Sibylla Merian and the Metamorphosis of Natural History’, Endeavour, XXXV/1 (2010), 15–21. This was far from the duchess’s experience of guava under hothouse care. Yet the etoile patterns — the spiders, their webs and weaver-ants — form an uncanny likeness to the rond-points of the hunting terrain in the Badminton estate survey of 1708 (pl. 104). John Evelyn, seeing emblematic resemblances, had pointed out how the spiders’ webs were ‘geometricall Toyles’, which ‘first taught foulers both how to make their netts, & to catch with them’.195John Evelyn, ‘Elysium Britannicum’, fol. 232; see also Evelyn, Elysium Britannicum, ed. Ingram, 301.

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Description: Branch of Guava tree with Army Ants, Pink-Toe Tarantulas, Huntsman Spiders, and...

103. Maria Sibylla Merian, Branch of Guava Tree with Ants, Spiders and Hummingbird (detail), circa 1701–5, watercolour and bodycolour over lightly etched outlines on vellum, 15 ⅜ × 12 ¾ in. (39 × 32.3 cm). Royal Library, Windsor Castle (RL 21172). Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2014

A branch of guava (Psidium guineense) is shown defoliated by leafcutter ants (top, Atta cephalotes) and army ants (lower left, Eciton sp.), both of which attack an unidentified orb weaver of the Araneid family (top left) and a roach (Blattaria genus). The pinktoe tarantulas (Avicularia avicularia — one with a possible ruby topaz hummingbird [Chrysolampis mosquitus], the other with egg sac and captured ant) are contrasted with the brown huntsman spiders (Heteropoda venatoria), mother and offspring (top right). Unlike the formal composition of Citron with a Moth and a Harlequin Beetle (see pl. 99), this is a dynamic view of predation and motion; it dramatized the life and death struggles of several species. The duchess of Beaufort, who cultivated guavas (either Psidium guajava or P. guineense) in her conservatory, must have been familiar with this plate from her 1705 edition of Metamorphosis, and Daniel Frankcom copied it with some precision.

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Description: A Map of Great and Little Badminton in the County of Gloucestershire, detail by...

104. Joseph Gillmore, A Map of Great and Little Badminton in the County of Gloucestershire, detail from a survey of the estate of Badminton, 1708, ink and watercolour on parchment, 25 ½ × 31 ½ in. (64.8 × 80 cm). Badminton House, QB 17/3/4. Photograph reproduced with the kind permission of His Grace the Duke of Beaufort

The young 2nd duke of Beaufort, as he took control of estate matters from his dowager grandmother, commissioned this survey. By 1709 he had succeeded in ousting the seventy-nine-year-old duchess, who retired to her Chelsea home. His premature death in 1714 left the way for the 3rd duke, coming of age in 1728, to undertake (before his death in 1745) significant building and landscaping — with James Gibbs, William Kent and Thomas Wright. This estate plan is thus crucial to the landscape evolutions initiated after the duchess’s departure, leaving behind some tangled relationships with the family.

James Petiver, when planning to translate the Surinam book into English, decided that it needed organizing methodically by the rules of science. Merian rejected his notions of a classificatory science in 1705, returning some specimens that Petiver had sent her. She was interested ‘only in the formation, propagation, and metamorphosis of creatures, how one emerges from the other, and the nature of their diet, as the esteemed gentleman can see in my book’.196Zemon, Women on the Margins, 181. This was her groundbreaking science, based on knowledge of Leeuwenhoek and other established scientists, yet developed with ‘ecological content’ by painstaking observation of organisms in their habitats.197Kay Etheridge, ‘Maria Sibylla Merian: The First Ecologist?’, in Women and Science: Pioneers, Activists and Protagonists, ed. V. Molinari and D. Andreolle (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), 31–49. She had first learned to love insects alive, and in the vernacular. She thought of the pupa as Dattelkerne (date stones), and nothing was lost of that first wonder at age thirteen: the unwinding of silkworm cocoons.198Ibid., 152 and 181. In the Metamorphosis, such homely terms became the poppetjens and aureliae used by her contemporaries. Yet Merian’s passion to know more about these creatures led her to devote decades to studying reproduction, development, behaviour and species interactions.

Petiver would go on independently to ‘methodize’ Merian’s work. He also saw her work as a chance to popularize the collecting of specimens by women, writing:

The pleasantness of the Speculation very well deserves the imitation of the most Curious part of her Sex, which is joined with Men of Observation, might in time produce large Histories of this kind in several parts of the World, and particularly of our own British Insects, which are daily found to be very numerous, and may be applied to many Advantages in Human Life, no less useful than those already known.199Quoted in Kinukawa, ‘Natural History as Entrepreneurship’, 322. See James Petiver, ed., ‘Madam Maria Sybilla Merian’s History of Surinam Insects, Abbreviated and Methodized, with Some Remarks’, in The Monthly Miscellany; or, Memoirs for the Curious (London, 1707–9), 287–94.

The Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium found its way into English libraries. One copy reached the duchess of Beaufort at Badminton in time for Frankcom’s training. Frankcom would produce laboured and undistinguished copies. While these and much else in the second album of the Badminton florilegium are artistically and scientifically second-rate, the value to the historian of floriculture and succulent culture is significant.200Beyond the paintings of Frankcom and those of George London’s daughter, further work is required to identify the artists of the second volume. For example, the paintings of florists’ flowers towards the end of the album (fols 90, 91 and 92) are of a generally higher quality than those by Frankcom. By contrast, lively portraits of English Lepidoptera jump out as especially noteworthy as vernacular art. These caterpillars and ‘flys’ are associated with plants, but more haphazardly than in Merian’s Metamorphosis or her earlier work, Der Raupen (1679 and 1683). Yet, unlike the work of Frankcom, they are no limp copies, for they convey a spontaneous sense of life cycle, metamorphic process and natural economy.

‘Exact Order’ or ‘Meer Chance’: The Patronage of Eleazar Albin and the Banishment of 1709–1715

The duchess left no dry collection of Lepidoptera on her death, but she did commission Eleazar Albin to paint butterflies. She encouraged him to work on his own book, helping him to find subscribers.201See Salmon, The Aurelian Legacy, 109–10, for an assessment of Albin’s work as an entomologist and painter. He issued a written appeal for subscriptions on New Year’s Day 1713. He completed fifty plates by the end of the following year before the duchess’s death slowed down his progress. See also Peter Osborne’s entry ‘Albin, Eleazar (d. 1742?)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; online edition: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/279 [accessed 30 September 2013]. Born to a family named Weiss somewhere in the German states, Albin — as he had named himself in England by 1708 — was in touch with Joseph Dandridge around 1709. Since the first plates for Eleazar Albin, A Natural History of English Insects (London, 1720), were engraved by 1713, it is likely that his first contact with the duchess of Beaufort dates from around her ‘exile’ at Chelsea in 1709 and extends over the years 1710–14. John Edmondson suggested, by personal communication on January 2012, that Richard Bradley could be the unidentified artist. See Bradley’s letters in the Sloane (Petiver) papers. Her patronage of Albin was duly, but posthumously, commemorated in the preface to his A Natural History of English Insects of 1720 (pl. 105):

For this curious Lady [a Mrs How] I painted a great Number of both Caterpillars and Flies, and likewise several Things relating to Natural History for Sir Hans Sloane: After this I was introduc’d to Her Grace Mary the late Dutchess Dowager of Beaufort, who imployed me in the same manner; this excellent Lady first perswaded me to undertake the following Work, and encouraged me by procuring me Subscriptions from several Persons of the first Quality . . .

Given this statement, it is tempting to assume that Albin was the artist of the Lepidoptera paintings in the second album at Badminton (pl. 106). They are labelled ‘English Insects’ and the first folio in the interrupted sequence of fourteen is dated 1708. Yet no evidence, archival or art historical, has clinched that appealing attribution. The authorship must — like so much else in the Badminton story — remain a matter for another study.202The folios are numbered 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 72, 79, 82, 83 and 87 and are of variable quality, with fol. 63 of a robin and Lepidoptera very naive and suggesting another hand. Julie Harvey of the Natural History Museum, London, kindly invited Martin Honey, lepidopterist, and Adam Dodd, historian of entomology, Oslo, to discuss these paintings with me on 7 December 2010.

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Description: A Natural History of English Insects, pl. 55 by Albin, Eleazar

105. Eleazar Albin, A Natural History of English Insects (London, 1720), pl. 55. Houghton Library, Harvard University (F Typ 705.20.132[A])

Albin’s Natural History was fostered by the duchess’s patronage. She had employed him to paint caterpillars and butterflies some time after 1705. This well-observed study of the large tortoiseshell (Nymphalis polychloros), showing its caterpillar and chrysalis on an elm, is one of the earliest published colour plates of British butterflies. Only a few of Petiver’s drawings, sold coloured, could be said to be earlier. The style and quality of this work — along with plate 11 of Albin’s Natural History (pl. 107) — makes for a comparison with the untutored studies in the second album of the Badminton florilegium (pls 106 and 109). The large tortoiseshell has been in decline in the UK since the 1950s, with only occasional records in southern England in recent decades.

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Description: Badminton florilegium, detail showing the puss moth larva or mange saule (Cerura...

106. Unknown artist, detail from fol. 79 of the second album of the Badminton florilegium, showing the puss moth larva or mange saule (Cerura vinula) on its willow food plant, watercolour and bodycolour over graphite on paper, 20 ¼ × 15 in. (51.4 × 38.1 cm). Badminton House. Photograph reproduced with the kind permission of His Grace the Duke of Beaufort

The drawing reveals none of the precision of Marshal’s two versions of the puss moth larva (Cerura vinula) drawn from life (pl. 108b). However, like plate 11 of Albin’s A Natural History of English Insects (pl. 107), it shows the larva correctly feeding on the willow leaves as its host plant, and it places the chrysalis nearby. While there is no evidence that the duchess kept pressed Lepidoptera specimens, her cultivation of living butterflies and moths can be seen as an extension of her breeding of auriculas featured in some folios of the second album of the Badminton florilegium.

In the preface to his Natural History of English Insects, Eleazar Albin wrote of the pleasure in observing the dust of a moth’s wing, the farina on a butterfly: ‘if they be examined by a Microscope, every Particle of them is a perfect Feather, and is placed in the Wing in most exact Order. From the whole we cannot but conclude that they are the Work of Infinite Power, and not the Effect of meer Chance, or the Product of Corruption’.203Albin, A Natural History of English Insects, preface (final page). So equally, a powdered auricula was a product of consummate workmanship, half nature and half art, and with a frailty that needed human protection. The slightest breeze — the lowest puff on the Beaufort scale204The Beaufort scale was developed by the admiral Sir Francis Beaufort (1774–1857) and has no connection to the dukes of Beaufort at Badminton. For a table relating the Beaufort scale to the terms given by Defoe, see Brayne, The Greatest Storm, table 1. — could ruffle an auricula, though protected by the walls of the Beaufort House garden. It required a special care to keep the maquillage immaculate. The duchess — an insomniac in later years, with ‘yellowish & greenish Appearances before her eyes during the day’ (as Sloane put it), and buffeted by family squalls — had lost the complexion of youth, but she continued to arrange the particles on flower and fly. For the octogenarian dowager duchess, venison-pasty anniversaries could no longer lighten the load that came in 1709 with banishment to her Chelsea home. And yet, troubled by a spleen and shooting pains, she was scarcely diminished in vim.205Sloane MS 4061, fols 1, 3, 5, 17 and 22. There was a redoubtable toughness, a flinty sharpness, in her will to fight whatever assailed her from without, whatever was eating her from within.

The eleventh plate of Albin’s Natural History, which is dedicated to ‘Mary Capell Dutchess Dowager of Beaufort’, reveals a picture of nature’s workings that is marvellous, yet scarcely pretty (pl. 107). The caterpillar (a) with a ‘purple Gibbosity on the Back’ is feeding on a willow stem at some time in late June to mid-August. Once put in a box, it pupates, turning itself by gnawed sawdust (b) into a chrysalis (c). The following May, the moth emerges (d and e) and lays its liver-coloured eggs (f ) to start another cycle. Except that ‘maggots’ laid by an ‘Ichneuman’ could sometimes stick to the caterpillar: ‘They pierce his Body with their Proboscis, which is small and sharp, thereby sucking their Nutriment from him’. Out of their chrysalis — ‘Cases of an earthly Colour’ (g) — a light-brown fly (h) emerges in lieu of a moth. Naturalists from Thomas Muffet or Moffet (1553–1604) to John Ray had called the caterpillar ‘Eruca Vinula, i.e. the Beau’. Alexander Marshal painted this same ‘mange saule’ or puss moth larva (Cerura vinula) in its ‘threat display’ (pl. 108b).

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Description: A Natural History of English Insects, pl. 11 by Albin, Eleazar

107. Eleazar Albin, A Natural History of English Insects (London, 1720), pl. 11, dedicated to ‘Mary Capell Dutchess Dowager of Beaufort’, hand-coloured engraving. Houghton Library, Harvard University (F Typ 705.20.132 [A])

The duchess of Beaufort was Albin’s chief patron, rounding up subscriptions for his prospective book: A Natural History of English Insects (1720). The attempt at a life cycle — and the representation and description of the ichneumon wasp laying its parasitic eggs — draws upon earlier works. Most notable were Maria Sibylla Merian’s first publication, Der Raupen (from 1679 onwards), and her Metamorphosis (1705). The caterpillar of the puss moth (Cerura vinula) is at the centre of Albin’s plate and may be compared to the depiction in the second album of the Badminton florilegium (pl. 106).

What the duchess pulled off in her final years of patronage is apparent by contrasting Albin’s plate to Marshal’s folio. The flowers of Marshal’s folio 102 are formalized. His album is synthetic: part stylized Parisian florilegium, part Dutch still-life realism and part spontaneous ‘botanical notebook’.206See Henrietta McBurney, ‘Marshal’s Place in the History of Botanical Illustration’, in Leith-Ross, The Florilegium of Alexander Marshal, 32. As a distinguished entomologist, he was skilled in showing the privet hawk-moth larva (Sphinx ligustri) on its food plant, privet (pl. 108a).207Ibid., 17–19. He could suggest a life cycle in the manner pioneered in Merian’s Der Raupen, the first part of which had been published a few years before his death. Yet, in his florilegium, he fell back on the formal convention of flower and insect abstracted on paper. Thus, although the puss moth larva of folio 102 is correctly observed from a live specimen, it is dissociated from its willow home.

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Description: Florilegium, fol. 142, detail by Marshal, Alexander

108a. Alexander Marshal, detail from fol. 142 (RL 24409) of his florilegium, 1650s–1682, watercolour on paper, approx. 18 ⅛ × 13 ⅛ in. (approx. 46 × 33.3 cm). Royal Library, Windsor Castle. Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2013

Marshal’s reputation as an entomologist was considerable during his lifetime, and he reared his own moths and butterflies. Hartlib referred to him as ‘the great-man for Insects’. Marshal shows the larva of the privet hawk-moth (Sphinx ligustri, pl. 108a) correctly on its food plant, privet, with five leaves already eaten. Despite this scientific prowess, Marshal presented many of the thirty-eight species of insects in his florilegium in isolation from host plants and without any sense of life cycle. This is the case with the two depictions of the puss moth larva (Cerura vinula, pl. 108b). Though carefully observed from live specimens, they are abstracted like dead specimens.

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Description: Florilegium, fol. 102, detail by Marshal, Alexander

108b. Alexander Marshal, detail from fol. 102 (RL 24369) of his florilegium, showing the puss moth larva (Cerura vinula) drawn from life but without its food plant, the willow, 1650s–1682, watercolour on paper, approx. 18 ⅛ × 13 ⅛ in. (approx. 46 × 33.3 cm). Royal Library, Windsor Castle. Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2013

By contrast, many of the butterfly and moth studies in the Badminton album try to follow the Merian model in showing plant and insect in association: for example, the red admiral (Vanessa atalanta) flutters around the stinging nettle (Urtica dioica), which is its principal larval food plant; a parasitoid wasp (probably Callajoppa exaltatoria) is depicted next to the eyed hawk-moth (Smerinthus ocellatus), in whose larva the ichneumonid lays its eggs, which emerge as adults at the pupa stage (pl. 109). Albin would go on in plate 11 of the Natural History to make larva and pupa one with the wider environment, caught in the balance of living or dying as mastication and predation dictate. Indeed, he referred frequently to Merian’s Der Raupen books, and his life cycles and larval host plants reflect an acquaintance with the masterly Merian plates.

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Description: Badminton florilegium, detail by Unknown

109. Unknown artist, fol. 72 in the second album of the Badminton florilegium, watercolour and bodycolour over graphite on paper, 20 ¼ × 15 in. (51.4 × 38.1 cm). Badminton House. Photograph reproduced with the kind permission of His Grace the Duke of Beaufort

Many of the butterfly and moth studies in the Badminton album — however clumsy as art — try to follow Merian’s model of life cycle. Here, for example, the anonymous artist shows insects in association with host plants and in stages of metamorphosis. The red admiral (Vanessa atalanta) flutters around the stinging nettle (Urtica dioica), which is its principal larval food plant. A parasitoid wasp (probably Callajoppa exaltatoria) is depicted close to the eyed hawk-moth (Smerinthus ocellatus), in whose larva the ichneumonid lays its eggs, which emerge as adults at the pupa stage (cf. pl. 107).

Kickius had succeeded in showing the vegetable world perfectly, if quaintly, reassembled and regenerative. In the snug, gale-free stove, the glow of ancient organic matter rekindled the ideal of perpetual spring. Seeds fall from capsules like manna from heaven. The unknown Lepidoptera artist at Badminton, like Albin in his Natural History, presented another microcosm, teeming with life, yet caught in endless cycles of a seasonal and predatory nature. Nothing is corrupted, but ‘meer Chance’ hovers close by. The ichneumon would lay its eggs soon enough. In her patronage, did the duchess pass on to Albin a sense that those cycles could end in things devoured, as Merian had observed, larva eating larva, or ants on the rampage?208See, for example, Merian’s accounts of larva and ants cited in Zemon, Women on the Margins: ‘Strange to note, when they have no food, this variety of caterpillars devour each other, so great is their hunger’ (147–8). ‘They burst forth once a year in countless numbers from their cellars. They fill up the houses, moving from one chamber to the next, sucking the blood out of any creature they meet, large or small. They gobble up a large spider in the blink of an eye, for so many ants attack at once that it cannot get away’ (184).

At that late stage in life, the duchess had become embroiled in a legal dispute — accusations from her eldest daughter, Elizabeth, that she had appropriated monies. By 1709 her grandson, having tolerated her stewardship, began a belligerent campaign. According to the duchess, in a series of letters ‘writ in very angry terms’, he told her that ‘if I did not comply, he would rout me from hence and expose me’.209Cited in McClain, Beaufort, 205. In filing a bill in Chancery, he joined forces with his mother and three aunts against his grandmother. In retaliation for the duchess’s obdurate refusal to hand over her husband’s personal estate, Henry forced her to leave Badminton when she was nearly eighty years old. In September 1709 she moved to London, accompanied by cartloads of tapestries, Persian carpets, embroidered chairs and a few favourite works including Commelin’s Horti medici Amstelodamensis rariorum plantarum (1697–1701). She left behind the stove.

It mattered little that the Lords declared in her favour on 18 December 1710, for the ‘pernicious distinctions’ were rife.210Ibid., 207. They might have remained virulent, were it not for the 2nd duke falling ill with smallpox. We are told that his grandmother took charge of his case and insisted on closed windows, drawn curtains and other popular precautions. She had a life’s experience of nursing to call upon, but the duke’s physician, John Radcliffe, overruled her, and bundled the old duchess out. On his successful treatment, the duchess was gracious enough to express overwhelming gratitude. Yet, for all her ancestral nursing and Dr Radcliffe’s state-of-the-art medicine, the duke had a way to do himself in through his passion for hunting. His premature death came in 1714: a contemporary report recorded that ‘after having heated himself shooting, he drank a great quantity of small liquor, which made him vomit blood and he died three days later’.211See Campbell Richard Hone, The Life of Dr John Radcliffe, 1652–1714: Benefactor of the University of Oxford (London: Faber and Faber, 1950), 60–61. I am grateful to Margaret Riley for this reference.

Eleanor Glanville, who died in the season of the duchess’s banishment, 1709, left her estate in the care of trustees to avoid her husband’s plots and machinations. Relatives, claiming that her interest in butterflies was a sign of madness, disputed the will. Neighbours were found to testify that she went out on the downs ‘without all necessary cloathes’, sometimes dressed ‘like a gypsey’.212Salmon, The Aurelian Legacy, 107. Her eldest son, Forest, filed a writ, alleging their dispossession resulted from her conviction that the children had been changed into fairies. In 1712 the judge at the Wells Assizes listened to some hundred witnesses including affidavits from Petiver and Sloane, but concluded nonetheless in Forest’s favour.

The year 1709 was a terminal one for these two exceptional women. Eleanor Glanville, thought mad by some, gave up the ghost. The duchess gave up a major part of her life’s work, even though she continued to commission drawings of her florists’ flowers at Chelsea (while completing the magnificent hortus siccus). The winter of 1708–9 had been especially severe, and doubtless there were losses in the Beaufort House garden. Her death in January 1715, however, spared her the fate of shivering through the frigid months of December 1715 and January 1716, when the River Thames froze again. The London theatres were almost deserted, losing out to the alternative attractions of skating, ninepins, gingerbread and gin. Since ‘great snow’ was recorded at Badminton, the stove must have struggled to stay hot and viable.213Gloucestershire Record Office, Badminton Papers, PA 2/4, 6. The duchess was laid to rest like a root in the ground, but protected in a sarcophagus that is housed in the southwest corner of the church on the south side of the great house at Badminton. The plants of her herbarium and florilegium would spring up every season thereafter, transformed by shrubbery, flower border and flowerbeds into ‘nosegays’ shimmering with butterflies.214See Mark Laird, The Flowering of the Landscape Garden: English Pleasure Grounds, 1720–1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), for an account of Lady Elizabeth Lee’s flowerbeds of 1799, which fulfilled the promise of the duchess’s plant introductions. A good list of all the plants identified by William Aiton as first cultivated by the duchess of Beaufort, and the number of each corresponding herbarium specimen, is given in The Sloane Herbarium, ed. Dandy, 212–14.

Postscript: The Legacy

The duchess of Beaufort’s triumph in growing a host of plants — from succulents to tropical fruits, and from the Pyrenean Ramonda to mountain-dwelling natives — is clear from Everhard Kick’s arresting imagery. And yet Kick’s mixum-gatherum Badminton florilegium appears baffling today (especially compared to his consequential work on Sloane’s Jamaica plants). Moreover, the dispersal of the duchess’s papers and hothouse collections compound the sense of a vainglorious pursuit in the vanity of collecting; for the heyday of growing stove-house exotics associated with the Anglo-Dutch era of William and Mary proved short-lived. Bishop Compton, for example, having lost his gardener George London, had to admit that the expenditure on exotics under glass was going through the roof: it was interfering with his charitable works. Samuel Reynardson of Hillingdon, whose collection was sold to Robert Walpole after his death in 1721, was typical of his generation. In 1730 the authors of the Catalogus plantarum looked back with regret: ‘as he kept them for the most Part confin’d to Pots and Tubs, preserving them in Green-houses in Winter, never attempting to naturalize them to our Climate, so, soon after his Death, that valuable Collection was so dispersed, as at present to be hardly known what he was possessed of ’.215Society of Gardeners, Catalogus Plantarum, preface vii. Posthumous destruction affected many of these early collections including Bishop Compton’s at Fulham after his death in 1713.

In the shift to acclimatization after the duchess’s death, hardy species (and sub-tropical annuals for summer planting out) proved a more enduring legacy. Indeed, a few plants depicted by Kick, with corresponding specimens in her hortus siccus, would quickly find roles in ornamental planting in the later eighteenth century. For example, Ricinus communis of folio 59 (and HS 133, fol. 67)216The specimen of the ‘smallest sort’ of ‘Palma Christi’ (Ricinus communis) is bound in with Gomphocarpus fruticosus and dated 1712 at Chelsea. appears in the centre of one flower clump in the Elysian Garden at Audley End. William Tomkins recorded it faithfully in his painting of 1788. Thomas Robins, painting at Woodside in the 1750s, saw Cape geraniums plunged in flower borders adjacent to a conservatory. Robins’s Rococo cartouche is woven with nodding persicaria, Polygonum orientale — the plant preserved in the duchess’s hortus siccus (HS 137, fol. 35) and first introduced by her to cultivation in England circa 1707.217The herbarium specimens are dated 1707 and 1708.

By 1799 Kick’s Gomphrena globosa, Ipomoea hederacea and Ipomoea coccinea were all in Lady Elizabeth Lee’s flower-beds at Hartwell House. Indeed, the staking of the ‘Convolvulus’ on folio 30 remained the practice one hundred years later (pl. 110, and see pls 296a and b). Plants in the Hartwell plans also appear in the duchess’s hortus siccus. William Aiton documented in his Hortus Kewensis of 1789 that Polygonum orientale, Helianthus giganteus and Veronicastrum virginicum were first cultivated by the duchess. The two giants from West and East — the perennial sunflower and nodding persicaria — turned Lady Elizabeth Lee’s beds into late-blooming wonders. They added autumn touches of colour, missing in Marshal’s seasonal florilegium.

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Description: Badminton florilegium, detail showing Ipomoea coccinea among other staked...

110. Everhard Kick (Kickius), detail from fol. 30 of the Badminton florilegium, album one (1703–5), showing Ipomoea coccinea among other staked ‘Convolvulus’, watercolour and bodycolour, heightened with gum, over graphite underdrawing, on vellum, 23 × 16 ¾ in. (58.4 × 42.5 cm). Badminton House. Photograph reproduced with the kind permission of His Grace the Duke of Beaufort

This staking of Ipomoea coccinea shows how exotics were used in flower borders or plate-bandes at the time of Kip and Knyff (1700, see pl. 64). Staking remained common until 1799, when Lady Elizabeth Lee re-designed the flowerbeds at Hartwell. Before the use of bamboo stakes, staking involved stems from a local coppice. The duchess’s other introductions — Polygonum orientale, Veronicastrum virginicum and Helianthus giganteus — played a significant role in those Hartwell beds, giving both stature and late seasonal colour to Lady Elizabeth Lee’s staked compositions (see pls 296a and b).

For all their preservation in the hortus siccus, they make no appearance in the Kickius album. This remains a puzzle like much else in the story of the duchess at Badminton. A systematic study of the florilegium folios and herbarium specimens might lead to a better understanding of correlations between these two spheres of activity. Dandy, pointing to the relative neglect that J. C. Loudon gave to Badminton, accomplished the first step in publishing a list of all the specimen attributions in Aiton’s Hortus Kewensis: a staggering total of more than sixty species, which range from the North American Comptonia asplenifolia to the North African Dolichos lablab.218See again Dandy, ed., The Sloane Herbarium, 212–14. ‘Padri Phaseolus’ (Dolichos lablab), HS 132, fol. 1, is undated and followed on fol. 2 by Erythrina corallodendrum, another ‘first’ attributed by Aiton to the duchess. The paucity of trees in the list is notable — Prunus mahaleb being one exception (and this may account for Loudon’s lack of interest in the duchess’s collecting at Badminton). In this sense, the duchess never lost her passion for floriculture — the flower craft behind the Kick album: from auricula to aloe.

Pelargonium zonale of the herbarium (HS 135, fol. 6, dated 1710) appears in the portrait of that species by Daniel Frankcom. The importance of the duchess’s cultivation of Cape succulents thus extends to the genus Pelargonium, some species of which exhibit similar water-retaining characteristics to an Aloe.219See Laird, ‘Greenhouse Technologies and Horticulture’, 58. In the Kickius album, Pelargonium myrrhifolium var. coriandrifolium and Pelargonium peltatum stand out (pls 111a and b). Mrs Delany would later celebrate these two among ‘Geranium’ in her work of late widowhood: the botanical collages or ‘paper mosaicks’ of 1773–82.220See Mark Laird and Alicia Weisberg-Roberts, eds, Mrs Delany and her Circle (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 194–5 and 216–19. Parallel to the pedigree of the Badminton collections, the duchess’s family pedigree leads through descendants, direct and distant — the gardening duchess Elizabeth, wife of the 4th duke of Beaufort, or the flower-painting Mary Forbes (née Capel) — to the Delany circle connected by kinship to Badminton. For example, Mary Delany’s friend Frances Boscawen (née Glanville) had a daughter, Elizabeth, who in 1766 married Henry Somerset, 5th duke of Beaufort from 1756. Mary, duchess of Beaufort was thus the rootstock virtuosa; those who followed were either grafted into the family or tried to emulate her virtù. Furthermore (as chapter 7 makes clear), for the trinity of Margaret Bentinck (née Cavendish), Elizabeth Lee (née Harcourt) and Mary Delany (née Granville), widowhood in old age was the prime of life and the acme of accomplishment.

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Description: Badminton florilegium, detail illustrating Pelargonium peltatum by Kickius,...

111a. Everhard Kick (Kickius), detail from fol. 46 of the Badminton florilegium, album one (1703–5), illustrating Pelargonium peltatum, watercolour and bodycolour, heightened with gum, over graphite underdrawing, on vellum, 23 × 16 ¾ in. (58.4 × 42.5 cm). Badminton House. Photograph reproduced with the kind permission of His Grace the Duke of Beaufort

In Hortus Kewensis (1789), William Aiton listed more than sixty species first cultivated in England by the duchess of Beaufort. These range from Comptonia asplenifolia to Dolichos lablab, from Pelargonium zonale to Celosia argentea, and from Prunus mahaleb to Eucomis regia. The duchess cultivated many Pelargonium from the Cape of Good Hope. They were introduced through Anglo-Dutch trade. What appears to be P. myrrhifolium var. coriandrifolium (right) could constitute yet another ‘first’ for the duchess, who was herself first in a great horticultural, cultural and artistic lineage.

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Description: Badminton florilegium, detail illustrating another Pelargonium species by Kickius,...

111b. Everhard Kick (Kickius), detail from fol. 11 of the Badminton florilegium, album one (1703–5), illustrating another Pelargonium species, watercolour and bodycolour, heightened with gum, over graphite underdrawing, on vellum, 23 × 16 ¾ in. (58.4 × 42.5 cm). Badminton House. Photograph reproduced with the kind permission of His Grace the Duke of Beaufort

1 For the best survey of the duchess and collecting, see Douglas Chambers, ‘ “Storys of Plants”: The Assembling of Mary Capel Somerset’s Botanical Collection at Badminton’, Journal of the History of Collections, IX/1 (1997), 49–60. An excellent account of the duchess’s legacy through her hortus siccus is given in J. E. Dandy, ed., The Sloane Herbarium (London: Natural History Museum, 1958), 209–15. »

2 Society of Gardeners, Catalogus Plantarum, Tum Exoticarum tum Domesticarum, quae in Hortis haud procul a Londino Sitis in Venditionem propagantur/A Catalogue of Trees, Shrubs, Plants, and Flowers, both Exotic and Domestic, Which are propagated for Sale, In the Gardens near London. Divided, according to their different Degrees of Hardiness, into particular Books, or Parts . . . (London, 1730), preface, vii. »

3 Ruth Duthie, ‘The Planting of Some Seventeenth-century Gardens’, Garden History, XVIII/2 (Autumn 1990), 77–102. »

4 Jennifer Munroe, ‘ “My innocent diversion of gardening”: Mary Somerset’s Plants’, Renaissance Studies, XXV/1 (February 2011), 111–23. »

5 Molly McClain, Beaufort: The Duke and his Duchess, 1657–1715 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001). I am indebted to this book in two respects: the first is the exploration of the duchess’s need for physic to aid her depressions; the second is the discussion of the Welsh terrain as ducal territory, which may help explain her interest in Wales as a collecting ground for plants. »

6 See, for example, Gloria Cottesloe and Doris Hunt, The Duchess of Beaufort’s Flowers (Exeter: Webb & Bower, 1983); and Jean O’Neill, ‘The Stove House and the Duchess’, Country Life (20 January 1983), 142–3. The shortcomings of the Cottesloe and Hunt text (with plant identifications) led Gordon Rowley to write an essay that remains the best scientific study of the Badminton florilegium. See Gordon D. Rowley, ‘The Duchess of Beaufort’s Succulent Plants’, Bradleya, V (1987), 1–16. Cottesloe and Hunt adopted the spelling ‘Kychicus’ (followed by Rowley), but a careful reading of the florilegium title points to ‘Kychious’. This is a corrupted version of the Latin form, Kickius. The first album of the florilegium by Kickius is dated 21 July 1703 to 14 July 1705 and measures in the binding 23 ½ × 17 ½ inches (59.7 × 44.5 cm). The second album, measuring in the binding 20 ⅞ × 15 ¾ inches (53 × 40 cm), was, according to Rowley, ‘apparently brought together at a later date as a convenient means of preserving all those other horticultural studies that had accumulated before and after the main work of Kychicus [sic]’. See again Chambers, ‘ “Storys of Plants” ’, for much background information used in this chapter. »

7 What I am calling the ‘Badminton florilegium’ (both albums) is a highly problematic collection of drawings, and, short of new work on Everhard Kick being completed (see note 107), my analysis of the Kickius album is merely a provisional overview. The first attempt at identifying the plants from Kick’s paintings (and from the polynomials with authorities given for each number on each folio) was undertaken in 1912. Canon Ellacombe (presumably Henry Nicholson Ellacombe, 1822–1916, honorary canon of Bristol) appears to have sought the assistance of Sir David Prain (1857–1944), director of Kew from 1905 to 1922, who was especially familiar with Indian plants from his time in Calcutta. He put modern names to pre-Linnaean names. His document is kept at Badminton, Fm Q4/3/12a 1912. When Gordon Rowley worked on the identities of the succulents in the mid-1980s, he had the help of David Hunt, who intended completing the identification of all the plants painted by Kick. After my discussions with Hunt, it became clear that only a provisional update could be undertaken, since a systematic study of the twelve-volume herbarium would need a team of researchers. Dr John Edmondson was kind enough to assist me in that preliminary appraisal, working from the Prain list, the Rowley list and Onno Wijnands’s identifications in The Botany of the Commelins; see note 15. »

8 The Latinate form Kickius is followed throughout (rather than ‘Kychious’) in discussing what I call the Badminton florilegium (which is without a formal title as such). As indicated above, it consists of two albums. The first album (1703–5) is entirely the work of Kickius. The second (apparently from around 1706 and up to 1714) contains the work of Daniel Frankcom, Henrietta London or ‘Miss London’ (daughter of the gardener and nurseryman George London). The end of that album is given over to the artist of the Lepidoptera folios, whose identity is discussed in Part II of this chapter, and to paintings of the duchess’s auriculas, etc., at Beaufort House. While the Frankcom and London drawings are of little artistic worth (and hence are not reproduced in this book), they do provide important horticultural information, as Gordon Rowley makes clear in his article, ‘The Duchess of Beaufort’s Succulent Plants’. »

9 For the idea of the hortus siccus or herbarium, see David Elliston Allen, ‘Walking the Swards: Medical Education and the Rise and Spread of the Botanical Field Class’, in Naturalists and Society: The Culture of Natural History in Britain, 1700–1900 (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2001), 337. »

10 McClain suggests this interpretation in her biography, Beaufort, 118–19. »

11 The analogy with Maria Sibylla Merian is put forward as an argument on gender in Chambers, ‘ “Storys of Plants” ’, 51. He writes that her ‘interest in the process of growth sets her apart from many of her contemporary male botanists, who were primarily interested in dried specimens and in classification’. The duchess’s interest in dried specimens and classification, however, is equally important; hence the analogous example of Eleanor Glanville, who collected dead Lepidoptera, is explored in this account. »

12 Molly McClain, ‘Somerset, Henry, First Duke of Beaufort (1629–1700)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online edition: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/26009 [accessed 30 September 2013]. »

13 The background to tropical plant cultivation is discussed in Mark Laird, ‘ “Perpetual Spring” or Tempestuous Fall: The Greenhouse and the Great Storm of 1703 in the Life of John Evelyn and his Contemporaries’, Garden History, XXXIV/2 (Winter 2006), 153–73; and Laird, ‘Greenhouses and Great Storm: John Evelyn on the Workings of God and Man in the Garden’, in A Celebration of John Evelyn: Proceedings of a Conference to Mark the Tercentenary of his Death, ed. Mavis Batey (Sutton: Surrey Gardens Trust, 2007), 98–119. See also Mark Laird, ‘Greenhouse Technologies and Horticulture: The 1st Duchess of Beaufort’s Badminton Florilegium (1703–5) and J. J. Dillenius’s Hortus Elthamensis (1732)’, in Technology and the Garden, ed. Michael G. Lee and Kenneth I. Helphand (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2014), 51–72. »

14 Cited in The Sloane Herbarium, ed. Dandy, 210. The ‘Abstract’ to Petiver’s collections (James Petiver, Musei Petiveriani . . . , ‘An Abstract’, 94) is dated 16 January 1703. »

15 D. O. Wijnands, The Botany of the Commelins: A Taxonomical, Nomenclatural and Historical Account of the Plants Depicted in the Moninckx Atlas and in the Four Books by Jan and Caspar Commelin on the Plants in the Hortus Medicus Amstelodamensis, 1682–1710 (Rotterdam: A. A. Balkema, and Salem, NH: MBS, 1983). »

16 David E. Allen, ‘Sherard, William (1659–1728)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; online edition: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/25355 [accessed 30 September 2013]; Margaret Riley has added some new findings on William and his brother James Sherard in ‘ “Procurers of Plants and Encouragers of Gardening”: William and James Sherard, and Charles du Bois: Case Studies in Late Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-century Botanical and Horticultural Patronage’, D.phil. thesis, School of Humanities in the University of Buckingham, September 2011. »

17 See E. C. Nelson, ‘Sir Arthur Rawdon (1662–1695) of Moira: His Life and Letters, Family and Friends, and his Jamaican Plants’, Proceedings and Report of Belfast Natural History and Philosophical Society, x (1977–82; reprinted 1981), 30–52; for a shorter and updated account, see E. Charles Nelson, ‘Moira’s Caribbean Treasures’, in his An Irishman’s Cuttings: Tales of Irish Gardens and Gardeners, Plants and Plant-Hunters (Cork: Collins Press, 2009), 56–9. »

18 See again Riley, ‘ “Procurers of Plants and Encouragers of Gardening” ’; and Stephen A. Harris, ‘The Plant Collections of Mark Catesby in Oxford’, in The Curious Mister Catesby: A ‘Truly Ingenious’ Naturalist Explores New Worlds, ed. E. Charles Nelson and David J. Elliott (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 2015): ‘When William Sherard died in 1728, his herbarium, which comprised some 12,000 sheets, was the largest and most celebrated in Europe.’ »

19 These were published in Mark Laird, ‘Exotic and Botanical Illustration’, chapter 6 in Sir John Vanbrugh and Landscape Architecture in Baroque England, 1690–1730, ed. Christopher Ridgway and Robert Williams (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton, 2000), figs 67–9. They are dated circa 1700 and, according to John Harris, possibly in the hand of Henry Wise rather than George London. »

20 For the background described here, see Martin Brayne: The Greatest Storm (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton, 2002), especially 46–52. Richard Hamblyn’s introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of The Storm (2005) remarks on winds over 70 miles an hour and a ‘300-mile-wide swathe of destruction’. It claimed the lives of more than 8,000 people. Hamblyn puts forward the idea that the cyclonic system almost certainly originated in the West Indies or off the coast of Florida. See also Dennis Wheeler, ‘The Great Storm of November 1703: A New Look at the Seamen’s Records’, Weather, LVIII/11 (November 2003), 419–27. »

21 Wheeler, ‘The Great Storm of November 1703’, 425, suggests that intense polar air recorded as moving southwards over New England probably met tropical air recorded as passing northwards in the mid-Atlantic days before the Great Storm. A westerly and cyclonic character of the month meant that temperatures were the warmest since November 1659, at 7.2°C (44.96°F). »

22 Ibid., 424. »

23 Cited in Brayne, Greatest Storm, 113. »

24 John Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. Esmond S. de Beer, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), V, 550, entry for 26–7 November 1703. »

25 Richard Hamblyn’s introduction to the new Penguin Classics edition of Daniel Defoe’s The Storm (London: Penguin Books, 2005), XIV–xxii, provides a useful account of Defoe’s ‘terrible year’ of 1703: the reward of £50 for the fugitive, who had written a satirical pamphlet considered a state ‘misdemeanour’, and his punishments once captured. Hamblyn points out Defoe’s ill luck in not being able to profit from his former brick-and-tile business in the aftermath of the storm. »

26 Daniel Defoe, The Storm (London, 1704), 81. »

27 For the importance of Defoe’s journalism as empirical science, and also as an insurance against libel, see Hamblyn’s introduction to The Storm (2005), xxiii–xxiv and xxviii–xxx. »

28 Defoe, The Storm, preface. »

29 Ibid., 14. »

30 Ibid., 22. »

31 Ibid., 24. »

32 Ibid., 25. »

33 Ibid., 51–5. »

34 Ibid., 92–3. »

35 Sloane’s description of the contents of HS 66 in the Natural History Museum, London. Cited by Dandy, ed., The Sloane Herbarium, 210. »

36 James Petiver, ‘An Account of divers Rare Plants, lately observed in Several Curious Gardens about London . . .’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, XXVII (1710–11), 392. The account was published on 1 January 1710. »

37 British Library, Sloane MS 4061, fol. 25v. »

38 See Howard Colvin, ‘Georgian Architects at Badminton’, Country Life (4 April 1968), 800. »

39 Roger North, The Lives of the Right Honourable Francis North, Baron Guilford (London, 1826), I, 272–4. I am indebted to Frances Harris for this reference. »

40 Cited in McClain, Beaufort, 118. »

41 Sloane MS 4071, 204. See Chambers, ‘ “Storys of Plants” ’, 52. »

42 John Evelyn, Silva; or, A Discourse of Forest-Trees (London, 1706). »

43 Ibid. The full account is as follows: ‘Methinks I still hear, and am sure feel the dismal Groans of our forests, so many thousands of goodly Oaks subverted by that late dreadful Hurricane, prostrating the trees, and crushing all that grew under them, lying in ghastly Postures, like whole Regiments fallen in Battle, by the Sword of the Conqueror: such was the Prospect of many Miles in several Places, resembling that of Mount Taurus, so naturally described by the Poet speaking of the Fall of the Minotaurs slain by Theseus.’ »

44 Roger North’s account of the household is invaluable in reconstructing the domestic economy of the estate, with its ‘200 persons’, and as represented in the estate plan of the late 1680s. See North, The Lives, 273: ‘The table were properly assigned; as, for example, the chief steward with the gentlemen and pages; . . . the clerk of the kitchen with the bakers, brewers, &c. all together; and other more inferior people, under these, in places apart: The women had their dining-room also, and were distributed in like manner.
The method of governing this great family was admirable and easy, and such as might have been a pattern for any management whatever. For if the duke and duchess (who concerned herself much more than he did; for every day of her life, in the morning, she took her tour, and visited every office about the house, and so was her own superintendent) observed any thing amiss or suspicious, as a servant riding out, or the like, nothing was said to that servant; but his immediate superior, or one of the high order.’ Everything was made in the house: soap and candles, malt, and ‘all the drink, that came to the duke’s table, was of malt sun-dried upon the leads of his house’ (274). »

45 See again Chambers, ‘ “Storys of Plants” ’, 49. »

46 For the background to this, see Duthie, ‘The Planting of Some Seventeenth-century Gardens’, 88. »

47 Sloane MS 4071, fols 95–8; and Sloane MS 4071, fols 87–93. A transcription is provided in Duthie, ‘The Planting of Some Seventeenth-century Gardens’, 88–92. »

48 Fol. 68 of the Kickius album places two old varieties of polyanthus (Primula × polyantha or P. × variabilis) alongside the Caribbean sea grape (Coccoloba uvifera). »

49 Duthie, ‘The Planting of Some Seventeenth-century Gardens’, 95. »

50 Auriculas were among the plants to which individual ‘short beds’ were dedicated. Four each were planted with auriculas and hepaticas; one each with tulips, bachelor’s buttons and lily of the valley. Seven of the twenty ‘short beds’ were planted with ‘gentian-ella’ (probably Gentiana acaulis). Alongside these were two mixed beds of auriculas, daffodils, hepaticas and snowdrops. (The Kip engraving shows only eight such beds instead of ten, but the record of 1691 clearly indicates ten by two.) They were partially shaded by the wall of the terrace overlook. »

51 Ruth E. Duthie, ‘English Florists’ Societies and Feasts in the Seventeenth and First Half of the Eighteenth Centuries’, Garden History, X/1 (Spring 1982), 22. »

52 Ibid., 25. »

53 Ibid., 33–4. »

54 McClain, Beaufort, 104. See also p. 200 for the account of the wedding anniversary celebration. »

55 The north-facing border beneath the terrace wall was planted with polyanthus (and possibly primroses, hepaticas and snowdrops). The east-facing wall border of the Great Garden also contained polyanthus. Indeed, polyanthus, primroses and auriculas were planted repeatedly in the shade of north-facing or east-facing walls, for example, in the Parlour Garden. Auriculas also lined three out of four grass plats in the Parlour Garden. In the Warren, it was primroses and polyanthus along the north-facing wall, with primroses against the west-facing wall. They were in bloom just as the asparagus beds were tipped with green shoots. »

56 It should be noted that not everything conforms to a seasonal sequencing. For example, on fol. 102 the double marsh marigold (Caltha palustris ‘Plena’) of spring is the odd one out, since the Hedysarum coronarium and Saxifraga umbrosa belong correctly in the summer garden. »

57 It remains to be clarified whether a greenhouse was ever constructed at Beaufort House according to the estimate sent in April 1689 by Matthew Baker at Hampton Court to John Bale. The cost was just over £178. The Kip and Knyff view does not appear to show any such structure. I am grateful to Jan Woudstra for drawing my attention to the estimate: Sloane MS 4062, fol. 231. »

58 In 1691 there were fifteen pots of Campanula persicifolia, twenty pots of Lobelia cardinalis and a single pot each of Lonicera sempervirens and Syringa × persica. »

59 Sloane MS 4071, fol. 242. »

60 Sloane MS 4071, fol. 309. »

61 Sloane MS 3343, fol. 219v. »

62 Letter from Badminton, dated 10 July (probably in the late 1690s), Sloane MS 4061, fol. 26. »

63 Sloane MS 3343, fols 10r–17v. »

64 Sloane MS 3343, fols 154v–156v and 172. This is elaborated twice again: ‘Roots and Seeds sent by Dr Doody to Badminton in the spring 1691’ (fols 190–191v); and in a fair copy ‘Roots and Plants sent by Mr Doody Apr: 1691’ (fol. 282) »

65 Sloane MS 3343, fol. 154. »

66 It was preceded by an entry — ‘1689 West India seeds given mee by Mris Chamberlain figured’ (Sloane MS 3343, fol. 152) — and followed by a record of Doody seeds of April 1691. »

67 Sloane MS 4062, fols 246–7. »

68 Sloane MS 4070, fols 25–6. »

69 Sloane MS 4071, fol. 139. »

70 Sloane MS 3343, fols 65–6, 183, 249–50. »

71 Sloane MS 3343, fols 77–8. »

72 Sloane MS 4070, fol. 110. There followed: ‘These are ye names of ye Plants wch Grow in Barbados Collected by me James Reed gardner in ye yeare 1690’ (Sloane MS 4070, fols 19–21). In 1692 the duchess recorded Lord Clarendon’s note of ‘Seeds from the West Indies’ (Sloane MS 3343, fol. 185–185v). Again she encountered discrepancies between name and plant. She was beginning to grapple with the cataloguing that had engaged the royal botanist Leonard Plukenet, among others. In 1692 and 1693 catalogues of plants at Hampton Court appear in her records (Sloane MS 3343, fols 1–7). One list from the royal gardens is entitled ‘fforreigne plants raised from seeds att Hampton Court 1692’ (Sloane MS 3343, fol. 5). »

73 Sloane MS 4072, fol. 202. »

74 Gloucestershire Record Office, Badminton Papers, D2700 QB 3/2. It is worth noting that the term ‘Orringerie’ or ‘Orringere’ clearly refers to the greenhouse structure itself rather than to the space outside for displaying citrus and other exotics. Jan Woudstra points out in his essay ‘The Re-instatement of the Greenhouse Quarter at Hampton Court Palace’, Garden History, XXXVII/1 (Spring 2009), 82, that the nomenclature in the Hampton Court accounts is inconsistent: ‘Glass Case’ might also be called ‘Green House’, and a different ‘Greenhouse’ might be called ‘Orangery’. »

75 See again Chambers, ‘Storys of Plants’, 49–60. »

76 For the origins of the Dutch hothouse, see D. O. Wijnands, ‘Hortus auriaci: The Gardens of Orange and their Place in Late 17th-century Botany and Horticulture’, in The Anglo-Dutch Garden in the Age of William and Mary, ed. John Dixon Hunt and Erik de Jong, special issue of Journal of Garden History, VIII/2–3 (April–September 1988), 75–6. For the Dutch hot-house and Magdalena Poulle, see Marisca Sikkens-De Zwaan, ‘Magdalena Poulle (1632–99): A Dutch Lady in a Circle of Botanical Collectors’, Garden History, XXX/2 (Winter 2002), 212–14. »

77 Sloane MS 4078, fols 385–6. The date appears to be May 1699, since the opening of the letter runs extensively over the 1st duke of Beaufort’s ill health. This important letter, written by the duchess and sent to Hans Sloane from Badminton, shows the steps from hot beds to the hothouse or ‘Conservatory’, which was converted in the year before the duke’s death: ‘all the good things you have sent mee, they they [sic] came very safe, I have had of the Shaddocks [Citrus maxima] formerly but none so ripe, it is a delicate fruite, I have a small tree of 4 years growth, if there bee a lesser smaller sort, I doubt my tree is of that, the leavs being but small, I have put some of these seeds in the ground hott bed, the seeds presented to the College by the East India Company I feare have fallen into such hands as a parcell that Mr London sent mee 2 years since happen’d to do, severall of those having [names wrong?] belonging to them (they being ordinary seeds) this is the list of those you were so kind as to send mee, I have writ upon the side my opinion of them, those that are come up apeare to bee what I thought them, when they are enough growne to show themselves, I will send you dry’d leavs of each, I expect more every day if the sun will bee so kind as to shine, every seed I sow’d of the cotton & Gourd that came wth them comes up, they have never been out of my Cabinet since they came, so that I am sure my gardiner has plai’d mee no tricks, I hope in God my Lords health will not make mee wish you in this place, but if anything else would bring you this way, it would please mee extreamly to have you see what a great Con[servatory?] my Lord has made for all Curiositys, beside the Stoves.’ I am grateful to Margaret Riley for help with this transcription. »

78 Sikkens-De Zwaan, ‘Magdalena Poulle’, 217. »

79 See here the Royal Society Journal Book Copy, vol. IX, p. 132: 1 March 1698/9: seeds from E. I. collection to be given to Sloane to distribute to a number of collectors (Robert Uvedale, Samuel Doody, Henry Compton, bishop of London, Charles du Bois and Jacob Bobart), as well as the duchess of Beaufort. There is also a list of East India Company seeds in Sloane MS 3343, fol. 130. I am grateful to Margaret Riley for this information. »

80 Sloane MS 3343, fols 232, 241, 247–8. »

81 Sloane MS 3343, fols 79–80, 94, 238, 279–80. »

82 Sloane MS 3343, fols 261–2. »

83 Sloane MS 3343, fol. 131. »

84 Sloane MS 3343, fol. 164. »

85 Sloane MS 4071, fol. 199. »

86 Sloane MS 3343, fol. 43. »

87 Sloane MS 3349, fol. 1. »

88 Sloane MS 4061, fol. 17. »

89 Cited in The Sloane Herbarium, ed. Dandy, 210. »

90 Ibid., 211. »

91 Sloane MS 4061, fol. 19. »

92 Dandy, ed., The Sloane Herbarium, 211. »

93 Sloane MS 3343, fol. 97. »

94 Sloane MS 4072, fols 177–8. »

95 Sloane MS 4070, fol. 199. »

96 Sloane MS 4061, fol. 23. »

97 For an account of the Hortus Malabaricus, see Ray Desmond, The European Discovery of the Indian Flora (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 19–24. Desmond refers to the Hortus Malabaricus as not just a first ‘regional floristic survey’ but also ‘a repository of ayurvedic medicine practised in Malabar’. See also the more recent English edition, with annotations and modern botanical nomenclature, by K. S. Manilal (Thiruvananthapuram: University of Kerala, 2003). »

98 Sloane MS 3349, fols 6v–7v. See again Desmond, The European Discovery of the Indian Flora, 23. He describes Van Reede’s work as indispensable to botanists: ‘The morphology of some 690 species is systematically presented: root, stem or trunk, leaf, flower, fruit, and seed. Even scent and flavour are recorded. Each description concludes with the plant’s use in agriculture, commerce or medicine. Plant names are given in Portuguese, Malayalam, Arabic, several South Indian scripts, and in Konkani in devanagari script.’ »

99 All details from Nelson, ‘Sir Arthur Rawdon (1662–1695) of Moira’. »

100 Sloane MS 3343, fols 88–9. »

101 Sloane MS 4061, fol. 3. »

102 Sloane MS 4038, fol. 47–47v. »

103 Sloane MS 4063, fol. 54, letter from Sherard at Badminton to James Petiver, dated 11 December 1700, and fol. 83, letter from Sherard to James Petiver, dated 28 April 1701; see also Sloane MS 4063, fols 58, 89, 90, 97, 138 and 145. »

104 Sloane MS 4063, fol. 44. On 27 September 1701 he wrote: ‘in ye mean time I shall not neglect drying plants. Mr. Adams is here designing some new plants & returns you his service’, Sloane MS 4063, fol. 120. »

105 Sloane MS 4038, fol. 84. »

106 See the cash books in Gloucestershire Record Office, Badminton Papers D2700 QB 3/2. The duchess’s signature (MB) on expenditures continues through 1702. On 6 October 1703 the 2nd duke’s signature had appeared. »

107 Research under way by Sachiko Kusukawa, Henrietta McBurney and Felicity Roberts will be published in ‘Everhard Kickius (c.1636–after 1705): The Work of a Little-Known Dutch Artist in Britain’ (submitted to Archives of Natural History in autumn 2014). I am greatly indebted to the authors for giving me vital information ahead of this publication. »

108 Personal communication from Charlie Jarvis (29 January 2014): ‘I would assume that ‘scientifically accurate’ was Sloane’s brief. But the drawings frequently did not go into the sort of floral detail that later scientists (e.g., Linnaeus) would have demanded’. »

109 Cited in Rowley, ‘The Duchess of Beaufort’s Succulent Plants’, 6. »

110 This account comes from Will Tjaden, ‘Richard Bradley . . . Succulent Plant Pioneer’, in Bulletin of the African Succulent Plant Society (1973–6), vol. VIII, 132, to vol. XI, 125, cited in Rowley, ‘The Duchess of Beaufort’s Succulent Plants’, 6. See also John Edmondson, ‘Richard Bradley (c.1688–1732): An Annotated Bibliography, 1710–1818’, Archives of Natural History, xxix/2 (October 2002), 177–212. »

111 Quoted in Rowley, ‘The Duchess of Beaufort’s Succulent Plants’, 6–7. »

112 For example, fol. 19 has Argemone mexicana alongside a thistle ‘Carduus with a white Flower’ (Cnicus ferox). »

113 Rowley, ‘The Duchess of Beaufort’s Succulent Plants’, 3 and 10. »

114 See again Sloane MS 4078, fol. 385. »

115 In 1789 William Aiton’s Hortus Kewensis gave the credit to the duchess as the first to cultivate it in England. Her specimen is preserved in the hortus siccus, HS 133, fol. 12. »

116 For issues of representation in natural history, see Victoria Dickenson, Drawn From Life: Science and Art in the Portrayal of the New World (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 78. »

117 See Wilfrid Blunt, The Art of Botanical Illustration [1950], ed. William T. Stearn (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1994), chapter 6. »

118 See Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi, An Oak Spring Flora (Upperville, VA: Oak Spring Garden Library, 1994), chapter II: ‘Florilegia: Flower Books for Collectors and Connoisseurs’, 17–28: ‘The first printed herbals date from the middle decades of the sixteenth century, while the first florilegia began to appear around 1600.’ »

119 Discussed in The Sloane Herbarium, ed. Dandy, 211. »

120 Ibid., 212. »

121 See Blunt, The Art of Botanical Illustration, 146. Blunt referred to Waller’s ‘sureness of touch and a sensibility that few professional painters of the day could command’. See Lawrence R. Griffing, ‘Who Invented the Dichotomous Key? Richard Waller’s Watercolors of the Herbs of Britain’, American Journal of Botany, LXXXVIII/12 (December 2011), 1911–23, which comments: ‘The accuracy of the identification of the watercolors is excellent.’ On the question of publication, Griffing wrote: ‘The suggestion is made in the Turning-the-Pages document (Royal Society of London, 2010) that Waller’s watercolors may have been intended as a set of illustrations for the classification system in Historia plantarum (Ray, 1686, 1688) . . . However, as described below, the watercolors of Waller were not intended as illustrations for a classification system, but as an identification key, based on images, produced as a folio arranged in leaf-ordered hierarchical clusters (tables), which serve as the search function for identification.’ »

122 Quoted in Griffing, ‘Who Invented the Dichotomous Key?’. »

123 Sloane MS 4071, fol. 2; see also Sloane MS 4063, fol. 163. »

124 I am grateful to Charles Nelson for posing the question: is this a chance variant in nature or in cultivation, or is it Kick’s stylized exaggeration? »

125 Observation made by Rowley, ‘The Duchess of Beaufort’s Succulent Plants’, 8. His full assessment was that Kickius was a ‘good botanical artist’, despite occasional errors and despite the stylized nature of the environmental settings. »

126 Sloane MS 3343, fols 116–17. »

127 McClain, Beaufort, 174. »

128 Sloane MS 4071, fol. 142. »

129 John H. Harvey, ‘The English Nursery Flora, 1677–1723’, Garden History, XXVI/1 (Summer 1998), 93. »

130 John Evelyn, ‘Elysium Britannicum; or, The Royal Gardens in Three Books’, British Library, Add. MS 78342, fols 325, 326, 328; see also Evelyn, Elysium Britannicum; or, The Royal Gardens, ed. John E. Ingram (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 405. »

131 Sloane MS 4070, fol. 35v. »

132 Conrad Loddiges & Sons, The Botanical Cabinet, vol. IX (1824), no. 869. »

133 Tomasi, An Oak Spring Flora, 17–18. »

134 Rowley, ‘The Duchess of Beaufort’s Succulent Plants’, 8. »

135 See Roger Phillips and Martyn Rix, Indoor and Greenhouse Plants, 2 vols (New York: Random House, 1997), 1, 215. »

136 Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800 (London: Allen Lane, 1983), 84: ‘Though upheld by mid-seventeenth-century herbalists, the belief in signatures was rejected by John Ray and Nehemiah Grew as wholly unempirical and rapidly disappeared from official botany.’ »

137 See Mark Laird, ‘Parterre, Grove and Flower Garden: European Horticulture and Planting Design in John Evelyn’s Time’, in John Evelyn’s ‘Elysium Britannicum’ and European Gardening, ed. Therese O’Malley and Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1998), 197. In his ‘Elysium Britannicum’, John Evelyn had highlighted a group of seven species with an asterisk — gum arabic, cinnamon, the dragon tree, avocado, sandalwood, sassafras and tamarind. He commented that they might be ‘a stranger with us, but prompting to experiments’. »

138 Cited in David Jacques and Arend Jan van der Horst, The Gardens of William and Mary (London: Christopher Helm, 1988), 170. »

139 Sloane MS 3349, fols 49–53v. See Jan Woudstra, ‘ “Striped Plants”: The First Collections of Variegated Plants in Late Seventeenth-century Gardens’, Garden History, XXXIV/1 (Summer 2006), 64–79. The list of 1692 is Sloane MS 4070, fols 196–7, that of 1697 is Sloane MS 4071, fols 35–6. Another copy of 1699 is Sloane MS 4071, fols 188–9. »

140 See Rowley, ‘The Duchess of Beaufort’s Succulent Plants’, 9. »

141 Ibid. »

142 Cited in Jacques and Van der Horst, The Gardens of William and Mary, 176. »

143 Gloucestershire Record Office, Badminton Papers, D2700 QB 3/2. »

144 Sloane MS 4078, fols 385–6: Badminton, May [1699?], continuation of letter from the duchess of Beaufort to Hans Sloane (see note 77 above), which gives an account of the great conservatory. I am grateful to Margaret Riley for help with this transcription: ‘what a great Con[servatory?] my Lord has made for all Curiositys, beside the Stoves, under a south wall of 18 foot high is a walke of 220 foot long 10 foot broad, the midle is a row of Orreng trees in the ground fill’d up between wth all sorts of stove plants, a border under the wall, halfe of it planted wth Adhatoda Rus Indian Laurell [Justicia adhatoda] &c most of them reach the top of the wall, the other halfe in pots on a shelf & on the ground resembles a hedge, these being [the next word may be ‘almost’, but a whole line is missing] this place has 4 fier places the smoake warming it under 2 paved walks, one that parts the midle from the border under the wall, the other along by the windows & doores, the roofe is halfe glasse the other [‘being next to the wall’ is inserted as an after thought] deale, in manner of window’s to raise, to let in raine & aire in very hott weather, every thing grows extravagently, one plant is now in flower that I fancie has not blowne in England, I have sent you by one of my Lord’s officers that is gone up a sprig dry’d, my Lord’s gardiner haveing a great inclination to drawing I made him draw it, that you might see the manner of it growing, it is time to ease [you/your?] [—] in reading this scribble Yr friend & servant M Beaufort’. »

145 See Wijnands, catalogue entry 136, in The Anglo-Dutch Garden in the Age of William and Mary, ed. Hunt and De Jong, 287. »

146 See Rowley, ‘The Duchess of Beaufort’s Succulent Plants’, 3. »

147 This background is fully covered by Jan Woudstra, ‘ “Much better contrived and built then any other in England”: Stoves and Other Structures for the Cultivation of Exotic Plants at Hampton Court Palace, 1689–1702’, in Technology and the Garden, ed. Lee and Helphand, 79–107 Woudstra describes the Bale report (see notes 67 and 150) as ‘an act of industrial espionage’. He provides a full transcription on pp. 103–4 of his chapter. »

148 See Woudstra, ‘The Re-instatement of the Greenhouse Quarter at Hampton Court Palace’, 82. »

149 Quoted from Rowley, ‘The Duchess of Beaufort’s Succulent Plants’, 179. »

150 See here Jacques and Van der Horst, The Gardens of William and Mary, 179–80. Sloane MS 4062, fol. 246, 1 September 1692. I am grateful to Margaret Riley for helping me with the transcription, and to Jan Woudstra for providing the best interpretation of the original text. »

151 This is Jan Woudstra’s interpretation in ‘ “much better contrived and built then any other in England” ’, since Bale was unable to detect the construction of the chimneys. »

152 See again Laird, ‘ “Perpetual Spring” or Tempestuous Fall’, 158–64. »

153 The account she gave to Sloane in May 1699 — ‘a great Con[servatory?] my Lord has made for all Curiositys, beside the stoves’ (Sloane MS 4078, fol. 386) — raises the question of whether separate ‘stoves’ were in use, which do not appear in the ‘Smith’ paintings of circa 1708–10. »

154 By 1703 the duchess’s gardener was Isaac Marsh. In the Great Badminton parish records, a ‘Mary Bennet’ was married to an ‘Isacke Marsh’ in 1669. Hence it is possible that, thirty-four years later, ‘Martha’ was the by then ‘old’ wife to the duchess’s gardener. See Sloane MS 3321, fol. 115, in which the gardener Adams writes to Petiver on 17 March 1703 about Martha and Isaac Marsh. It seems likely that she followed the duchess in her banishment to Beaufort House in Chelsea in 1709. See Royal Society, Sherard MS 254, fol. 455, 24 May 1714, Hans Sloane writing to William Sherard: ‘the Dutchesse of Beaufort still laboures with Martha Marfling’. I am very grateful to Margaret Riley for this information. »

155 The ‘nursing touch’ as green-fingers knowledge is explored in Laird, ‘Greenhouse Technologies and Horticulture’, 69. »

156 Woudstra, ‘much better contrived and built then any other in England’, 94. »

157 Woudstra, ‘The Re-instatement of the Greenhouse Quarter at Hampton Court Palace’, 82. »

158 Woudstra, ‘ “much better contrived and built then any other in England” ’, 95. »

159 See Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England: Gloucestershire: The Cotswolds, 3rd edn, rev. David Verey and Alan Brooks (London: Penguin Books for the Buildings Book Trust, 1999), 388. »

160 See Amanda Vickery, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 13, 160. She shows how Badminton sustained the pattern of large Stuart rural households, in which self-sufficient production significantly balanced new consumption, making the duchess like an ‘army colonel’ in charge of troops. »

161 Sloane MS 4078, fol. 385. »

162 Sloane MS 4061, fols 25–6. »

163 Cited in McClain, Beaufort, 119. These were in fact galls from Quercus coccifera, Kermes oak, which resembled berries. »

164 Ibid., 56. »

165 Badminton Muniments Room, FME 4/1/18. Cited in McClain, Beaufort, 198. »

166 North, The Lives, 273. »

167 See Keith Thomas, The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 102, 170–71. »

168 Ibid., 31–4. »

169 Prudence Leith-Ross, The Florilegium of Alexander Marshal (London: The Royal Collection, 2000), 7. »

170 Cited in David Elliston Allen, The Naturalist in Britain: A Social History [1976] (2nd edn, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 24. »

171 See here the account in Michael A. Salmon, The Aurelian Legacy: British Butterflies and their Collectors (Colchester: Harley Books, 2000), 30–31 and 398, where circa 1738 is given as a more precise founding date. »

172 Ibid., 27 and 397. »

173 See here Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Metamorphoses’, in Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-century Lives (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1995), 140–202; Kurt Wettengl, ed., Maria Sibylla Merian, 1647–1717: Artist and Naturalist (Ostfildern: Gerd Hatje, 1998); Katharina Schmidt-Loske, Die Tierwelt der Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717): Arten, Beschreibungen und Illustrationen (Marburg: Basilisken-Presse, 2007); and Ella Reitsma, Maria Sibylla Merian and Daughters: Women of Art and Science (Zwolle: Waanders, 2008); Brigitte Wirth, ‘Maria Sibylla Merian, Baltasar Scheid und Richard Bradley: die Künstlerin und Naturforscherin, ein Kaufmann und ein Botaniker’, Annals of the History and Philosophy of Biology, XII (2007), 115–53. See also Florence F. J. M. Pieters and Diny Winthagen, ‘Maria Sibylla Merian, Naturalist and Artist (1647–1717): A Commemoration on the Occasion of the 350th Anniversary of her Birth’, Archives of Natural History, XXVI/1 (April 1999), 1–18; Kay Etheridge and Florence F. J. M. Pieters, ‘Maria Sibylla Merian: Pioneering Naturalist, Artist and Inspiration for Catesby’, in The Curious Mister Catesby, ed. Nelson and Elliott. »

174 Etheridge and Pieters, ‘Maria Sibylla Merian’, [forthcoming]. »

175 Salmon, The Aurelian Legacy, 106–7. »

176 Ibid., 107. »

177 Allen, The Naturalist in Britain, 4. »

178 Salmon, The Aurelian Legacy, 69. »

179 Cited in ibid., 61. »

180 Ibid., 65. »

181 See Sloane MS 4061, fol. 1: a letter to Sloane after Kickius’s departure, dated ‘Feb the 19’ (1706–8?), in which she writes: ‘I am busy wth my dry’d plants, if I had a good assistant I believe I could make a Catal of 2000 plants . . . one of my footmen learn’t a little to paint of Keke, hee has made a shift to paint some Aloes that have bloome since the other went from hence.’ »

182 James Petiver, Musei Petiveriani . . . , ‘An Abstract’ (London, 16 January 1703), 94. ‘In her Grace the DUCHESS of BEAUFORTS most Noble Garden and Matchless Stoves at Badminton in Gloucestershire, I the last Summer met with many New, Rare and very Curious Plants, most of them raised to that Perfection I never saw before!’ »

183 James Petiver, Gazophylacii naturae & artis decas prima . . . (London, 1702). »

184 Salmon, The Aurelian Legacy, 107. »

185 Ibid., 339–42. »

186 See Jim Asher et al., The Millennium Atlas of Butterflies in Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 236–9. »

187 I am very grateful to Florence Pieters and Brigitte Wirth for researching this, and for providing the transcription of Seba’s letter dated 11 December 1703, in which he refers to the ‘great stormy wind’ of 8 December (Gregorian, corresponding to 27 November in the Julian calendar, see Introduction). It opens with the statement: ‘Hier ist sonderlich nächstes Notabels voorgefallen als ds wir den achten dieses alhier einen großen Sturm windt haben auß gestanden, und die meisten Häuser beschädiget’. »

188 Sloane MS 4063, fol. 214. »

189 Zemon, Women on the Margins, 178. »

190 T. Kinukawa, ‘Natural History as Entrepreneurship: Maria Sibylla Merian’s Correspondence with J. G. Volkamer II and James Petiver’, Archives of Natural History, XXXVIII/2 (2011), 313–27. »

191 Zemon, Women on the Margins, 178. »

192 Kinukawa, ‘Natural History as Entrepreneurship’, 318–20. »

193 Personal communication from Florence Pieters (24 January 2014): ‘The museum of Wiesbaden has a collection of butterflies dating back to Merian’s time and several of these are proven to be the real MODELS for her plates in Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium.’ See Joos van de Plas, Second Life: Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium Revisited (Wiesbaden: Museum Wiesbaden, 2013). »

194 See Kay Etheridge, ‘Maria Sibylla Merian and the Metamorphosis of Natural History’, Endeavour, XXXV/1 (2010), 15–21. »

195 John Evelyn, ‘Elysium Britannicum’, fol. 232; see also Evelyn, Elysium Britannicum, ed. Ingram, 301. »

196 Zemon, Women on the Margins, 181. »

197 Kay Etheridge, ‘Maria Sibylla Merian: The First Ecologist?’, in Women and Science: Pioneers, Activists and Protagonists, ed. V. Molinari and D. Andreolle (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), 31–49. »

198 Ibid., 152 and 181. »

199 Quoted in Kinukawa, ‘Natural History as Entrepreneurship’, 322. See James Petiver, ed., ‘Madam Maria Sybilla Merian’s History of Surinam Insects, Abbreviated and Methodized, with Some Remarks’, in The Monthly Miscellany; or, Memoirs for the Curious (London, 1707–9), 287–94. »

200 Beyond the paintings of Frankcom and those of George London’s daughter, further work is required to identify the artists of the second volume. For example, the paintings of florists’ flowers towards the end of the album (fols 90, 91 and 92) are of a generally higher quality than those by Frankcom. »

201 See Salmon, The Aurelian Legacy, 109–10, for an assessment of Albin’s work as an entomologist and painter. He issued a written appeal for subscriptions on New Year’s Day 1713. He completed fifty plates by the end of the following year before the duchess’s death slowed down his progress. See also Peter Osborne’s entry ‘Albin, Eleazar (d. 1742?)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; online edition: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/279 [accessed 30 September 2013]. Born to a family named Weiss somewhere in the German states, Albin — as he had named himself in England by 1708 — was in touch with Joseph Dandridge around 1709. Since the first plates for Eleazar Albin, A Natural History of English Insects (London, 1720), were engraved by 1713, it is likely that his first contact with the duchess of Beaufort dates from around her ‘exile’ at Chelsea in 1709 and extends over the years 1710–14. John Edmondson suggested, by personal communication on January 2012, that Richard Bradley could be the unidentified artist. See Bradley’s letters in the Sloane (Petiver) papers. »

202 The folios are numbered 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 72, 79, 82, 83 and 87 and are of variable quality, with fol. 63 of a robin and Lepidoptera very naive and suggesting another hand. Julie Harvey of the Natural History Museum, London, kindly invited Martin Honey, lepidopterist, and Adam Dodd, historian of entomology, Oslo, to discuss these paintings with me on 7 December 2010. »

203 Albin, A Natural History of English Insects, preface (final page). »

204 The Beaufort scale was developed by the admiral Sir Francis Beaufort (1774–1857) and has no connection to the dukes of Beaufort at Badminton. For a table relating the Beaufort scale to the terms given by Defoe, see Brayne, The Greatest Storm, table 1. »

205 Sloane MS 4061, fols 1, 3, 5, 17 and 22. »

206 See Henrietta McBurney, ‘Marshal’s Place in the History of Botanical Illustration’, in Leith-Ross, The Florilegium of Alexander Marshal, 32. »

207 Ibid., 17–19. »

208 See, for example, Merian’s accounts of larva and ants cited in Zemon, Women on the Margins: ‘Strange to note, when they have no food, this variety of caterpillars devour each other, so great is their hunger’ (147–8). ‘They burst forth once a year in countless numbers from their cellars. They fill up the houses, moving from one chamber to the next, sucking the blood out of any creature they meet, large or small. They gobble up a large spider in the blink of an eye, for so many ants attack at once that it cannot get away’ (184). »

209 Cited in McClain, Beaufort, 205. »

210 Ibid., 207. »

211 See Campbell Richard Hone, The Life of Dr John Radcliffe, 1652–1714: Benefactor of the University of Oxford (London: Faber and Faber, 1950), 60–61. I am grateful to Margaret Riley for this reference. »

212 Salmon, The Aurelian Legacy, 107. »

213 Gloucestershire Record Office, Badminton Papers, PA 2/4, 6. »

214 See Mark Laird, The Flowering of the Landscape Garden: English Pleasure Grounds, 1720–1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), for an account of Lady Elizabeth Lee’s flowerbeds of 1799, which fulfilled the promise of the duchess’s plant introductions. A good list of all the plants identified by William Aiton as first cultivated by the duchess of Beaufort, and the number of each corresponding herbarium specimen, is given in The Sloane Herbarium, ed. Dandy, 212–14. »

215 Society of Gardeners, Catalogus Plantarum, preface vii. »

216 The specimen of the ‘smallest sort’ of ‘Palma Christi’ (Ricinus communis) is bound in with Gomphocarpus fruticosus and dated 1712 at Chelsea. »

217 The herbarium specimens are dated 1707 and 1708. »

218 See again Dandy, ed., The Sloane Herbarium, 212–14. ‘Padri Phaseolus’ (Dolichos lablab), HS 132, fol. 1, is undated and followed on fol. 2 by Erythrina corallodendrum, another ‘first’ attributed by Aiton to the duchess. »

219 See Laird, ‘Greenhouse Technologies and Horticulture’, 58. »

220 See Mark Laird and Alicia Weisberg-Roberts, eds, Mrs Delany and her Circle (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 194–5 and 216–19. »

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