THE BODY, IN THEORY

Histories of Cultural Materialism

Editors

 

Dalia judovitz, Emory University
james 1. Porter, University of Michigan

Editorial Board

Malcolm Bowie, Francis Barker,

Norman Bryson, Catherine Gallagher,
Alphonse Lingis, A. A. Long,

jean-Francois Lyotard, Elaine Scarry

Jean Louis Schefer, Susan Stewart

The body constructed by theory and through social and cultural practices
has provided the departure point for studies that broach new fields and
styles of inquiry. The aim of the series The Body, in Theory: Histories of
Cultural Materialism is to reconstruct a history of materialisms (aesthetic,
linguistic, and philosophical) by locating the body at the intersection of

speculative and cultural formations across a wide range of contexts.

Titles in the series
The Subject as Action: Transformation
and Totality in Narrative Aesthetics
by Alan Singer

Power and Knowledge: Astrology,
Physiognomics, and Medicine
under the Roman Empire
by Tamsyn 5. Barton

Under the Sign: john Bargrave
as Collector, Traveler, and Witness
by Stephen Bann

 

2&9

UNDER
THE SIGN

john Bargrave as
Collector, Traveler,
and Witness

BY
STEPHEN BANN

Ann Arbor
The University
of Michigan
Press


 

Copyright © by

the University of Michigan 1994
All rights reserved
Published in the United States of America by
the University of Michigan Press
Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed on acid-free paper
19941995 1996 1997

1234
A CIP catalogue record for this

book is available from the
British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-imPublication Data

Bann, Stephen.
Under the sign : john Bargrave as collector, traveler, and witness
/ by Stephen Bann,
p. cm. — (The Body, in theory : histories of cultural
materialism)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-472-10436-5
1. Bargrave,]ohn, 16lo—i68o. 2. Collectors and collecting—
England—Canterbury—Biography 3. Church of England—Clergy——
Biography 4. Anglican Communion——England——Clergy—Biography
5. Antiquities—Private collections—England—Canterbury
I. Title. II. Series: Body, in theory.
AM40I.B3']B36 1994
o69'.5’o92—dc20
lBl 94‘20371
Cl?

FORJOHN
born
three centuries
after


L

Under the Sign

is placed in the right—hand column, has the effect almost of a

litany It hardly recreates the verbal felicities that the laconic

form of the inscription makes particularly poignant: “Generosa

Bargrauiana Terra,” “Stetit et ceciditFAMIL1A,” “Haeres a ruinis in

Ruinas.” Not even a transcription of the Latin characters into

typographic form could, moreover, convey some of the subtle

inflections that the epigrapher’s chisel has been able to intro-
duce. There are three john Bargraves featured here, and yet each

of them is minutely distinguished from the other. john the Elder,
‘founder of Bifrons,” has the full Latinate form of his name:

Iohannes. john the Heir is identified by the contracted form:

lohan. John the writer of the inscription, finally, has the con-
tracted form embellished by cursive strokes across the top and

bottom of the I, which seems appropriate to the character of a

signature.

These various aspects of the Bargrave memorial, which indeed
show it to be a more sophisticated if less showy product than
most of the other memorials placed in Kent after the Civil War,1
do not however clarify the enigma that it presents us with. It is
the extraordinarily sweeping nature of the message that discon-
certs us -— even the paradoxical nature of the claim that is being
made. How and when did the “Family” die? As opposed to the
conventional type of English church monument that records, in
grandiloquent detail, the qualities, alliances, and public actions
of the individual or family in question, this inscription gives the
impression of a sudden, catastrophic blow that has annihilated
all such particularities. john the Elder both founded the arrni-
gerous family and built the great house of Bifrons — that much is
plain — and the two words Bifrontis and Familia are the only ones
capitalized in the text. But what are the stakes of the surviving
johns —]ohn the Heir, whose chances of reviving the family and
plucking something out of the “ruins” are being written off so
definitively, and john the Prebendary, whose voice resonates
throughout the entire text?

On one level, of course, the memorial inscription is a witness
to a social and economic process that was taking place through-
out the county of Kent in the feverish years that followed the
Restoration of King Charles 11. Families that had staunchly de-

26

Rise and Fall of the House of Bargrave

fended the Royalist cause, and laid low throughout the Com-
monwealth period, were faced with a stark choice of alternatives:
either to sell up their estates and pay off their accumulated debts
or to petition the king for some restitution of the resources that
they had used in his service? The Bargraves were no exception.
Henry Oxinden, their neighbor and relative by marriage, recog-
nized the plight, which he himself shared, when he wrote in a
letter dated 9 December 1661: “Bifrons, a house that was my
brother Bargraves, beside Bridge hill, was lately sold; and now I
doubt not but mine will follow.”3 But Oxinden is also witness to
the comparative success with which John Bargrave, after hurry-
ing back to England from his fourth and last visit to Rome,
succeeded in relaunching the career that had been brutally cut
short by his expulsion from Peterhouse in 1644. On 12 November
1660, he was made a Doctor of Theology by royal mandate and,
on 23 December 1660, ordained priest by Robert Sanderson,
Bishop of Lincoln, in the Barbican Chapel, City of London. All
this was simply a prelude to. the preferment that Bargrave really
desired, and which is recorded in a further letter by Henry Ox-
inden, from September 1662:

Dr. Bargrave is newly chosen Prebend of Canterbury in roome
of an old Prebend lately deceased and is now uppon going to
Argiers to redeem some Captives. I met him at Lambeth upon
Tuesday last.‘*

So, within two years of the Restoration, John Bargrave had suc-
ceeded in breaking out of his peripatetic life and ensuring a

comfortable future. He could add to his name, as in the book pre-
sented to the Peterhouse library, “Dottore in Teologia 1661,” and

then again “Canonico della Chiesa Cathedrale di Cantuaria.”5 He

was to go on one more foreign journey, the most far-ranging and

certainly the most perilous of his life. But this was at the express

wish of His Majesty and a signal mark of royal favor.5 On his

return, in 1663, he could afford to devote a little time, and per-
haps even a little money, to the setting up of a suitable memorial

to the members of his family who had suffered and died in the

Civil War. He could also begin to install, in his newly acquired

prebendal lodgings, which were held for life, the accumulated

objects of his collection.

27


Under the Sign

convert) never used the Calvinist jam with which successive
Dutch authors have demonstrated their perhaps unconscious
concern to “bring him closer to the mainstream of Calvinist
culture.”

Bargrave, who is on most occasions content to sign himself
with the English john, reserves for his Latin inscriptions the
appropriate Latinate form of Iohan. What is inscribed in stone
requires a more universal mark of subjectivity. But john and
Iohan, not to mention joannis and Giovanni, partake of a com-
mon identity, which is their link, in the Roman and the English
churches, to the saint credited with the authorship both of the
fourth Gospel and of the Book of Revelation. “And Ijohn saw
these things. . . .”31 It would be an enigmatic motto for the
painter who so skillfully concealed his intermediacy in the pro-
cess of scenography and optical registration of the image. For
John Bargrave, it would be no more than the claim made by a
traveler and collector who demanded also to be accepted as a
true witness.

24

ONE

RISE AND
FALL OF THE HOUSE
OF BARGRAVE

nter the late Norman parish church of Patrixbourne,

about two miles southeast of Canterbury in the Dover

direction, and you will find, just on the other side of the
main South Door, a large black marble memorial stone lying in
your path. It is out of place, having been removed from the
adjacent family chapel (one supposes) at the behest of one of the
more recent proprietors of the nearby Bifrons estate, and its
abraded edges are set quite crudely into the diaper-patterned tile
floor. But its inscription, and the swirling coat of arms above,
have not suffered so much as to become illegible (fig. 7). I trans-
late the text as follows:

Through the whole of this vault The gentle earth
There is scattered } of the Bargraves

Of which armigerous family

john the founder of BIFRONS L,

And his heir Robert beneath this le

Marble together with their wives

In the Civil War on the King’s side A

m

The FAMILY stood and fell l en

Grieving he wrote this their son Prebendary of the
and brother john l Church of Christ Canterbury
Johnlthe Heir from ruins } Year of our Lord 1663
to ruins placed this stone

The English translation does not, of course, reproduce the
rhythms and cadences of the Latin or do justice to its curious
antiphonal structure, which, especially when the one word Amen

25


Under the Sign

Yet there can be no question of drawing a line, at this stage in
Bargrave’s life, between the past and the future. Bargrave was
working out his period of mourning (“Lugens scripsit”) in these
years and, as Freud has reminded us, after a great catastrophe
the libido eventually starts to attach itself to new objects, as a
substitute for the old.7 But his identity was still the one that had
been forged in his early years, in and around Canterbury and
subsequently at Cambridge. The message that is condensed in
the Patrixboume inscription conveys that this is a family that
has risen and fallen, in the space of two generations, as a result of
a public calamity. But it does not convey the fact that the rise and
fall of the Bargraves took place, for the first time, over the short
span of Johns own childhood and that the Civil War only re-
affirmed, on the macrohistorical scale, the ruin that had already
come close to unseating the house of Bifrons. This story, in
outline, still needs to be told.

2&9

The surname of Barger (also written as Bargar and, occasionally,
Bargrowe or Bargrave) is to be found in the area in and around
Canterbury from the late medieval period onward. The inven-
tory of church goods belonging to St. Andrew’s, Canterbury,
which was made in 1485, refers to a vestment donated by “Syr
Deder [i.e., Didier, or Desiderius] Barger sumtyme parson."8 A
century later, numerous names appear in church court records
and other official documents that indicate that families of this
name were established in two main areas: the village of Willes-
borough, near Ashford, where Robert Bargar is recorded as pos-
sessing a tannery in 1599,9 and that of Bridge, in the vicinity of
Canterbury, where Arnold Bargar is recorded as living in 1570.10
The Bargrave variant of the name occurs extremely rarely, as with
Elizabeth Bargrave, of Willesborough, who was excommunicated
around 1560 for being “with child by Robert Torfer of Chartham a
servant of Robert Stede of Hinxhill”11 (see fig. 8).

The father of the builder of Bifrons, and grandfather of the
collector, seems to have used two different orthographies in the
spelling of his name. The marriage of Robert Bargrave, of Bridge,
and Joan Gilbert, of the Parish of St. Peter’s, Sandwich, is re-

28

1

Rise and Fall of the House of Bargmve

corded as having taken place on 1 February 1568.12 The will of
“Robert Bargar, yeoman,” of Bridge, is proved, however, in the
Prerogative Court of Canterbury in 1600. No special significance
should be attached to these changes in orthography, which were
common in families belonging to the yeoman class. It was only
when Robert’s eldest son, John, acquired a grant of arms in
September 1611 that the surname became standardized in its more
euphonious form.13
Robert Bargar was a yeoman farmer and tanner of some
wealth, who justified the truth of the traditional rhyme:

A Knight of Wales
A gentleman of Cales [Calais]
A laird of the North Countree

A Yeoman of Kent
With his yearly rent
Will buy them out all three.”

If Bargar shared in the general prosperity that was to make Kent
“second or third place” in wealth among the English counties by
the mid—seventeenth century,15 he was also no doubt helped by
the dowry of his wife, who came of a wealthy Sandwich family
and may have brought him the property in nearby Nonington
that he bequeathed to the parish in 1600.15
Certainly the provisions that Robert Bargar made for his male
children were in no way different from those that Dorothy Gar-
diner establishes as “routine” for “the family of an East Kent
landowner”:
University training for his eldest son, beginning perhaps at
fourteen, followed often by a call to the Bar; for one other son,
the second, if gifted enough with brains, Oxford or Cambridge
likewise, ordination to the Church's ministry, and to crown all,
a family preferment. . . .17

Their firstborn son, born in the early 1570s, is almost certainly
the “john Bargar . . . perhaps of Kent” who matriculated as a
fellow commoner from Clare College in 1588 and was later ad-
mitted to the Bar at Lincoln’s Inn on 7 November 1590. For the
second possibility — the son who was to make his name in the
church — the yeoman of Bridge seems to have been willing to take

29


Under the Sign

every chance that was offered. Thomas, born next after john,
must have had a good education, though no record of it remains;

in 1614, he was presented to the living of Sevington, yet he was to

die, in distant Virginia, in 1621. Richard, the third son, was almost

certainly a King’s scholar at the Kings School, Canterbury, be-
tween 1598 and 1601, but must have decided against an eccle-
siastical career and chose instead to serve as a soldier.18 Finally,

Isaac, the youngest of six sons, emulated his eldest brother in

gaining his B.A. degree at Pembroke College, Cambridge, in

1606-7 and his D.D. degree from Clare in 1621.19 When Thomas

was presented to Sevington, he conveniently made over his pre-
vious living of Eythorne, near Dover, to his younger brother.
Isaac was to make rapid progress up the ecclesiastical hierarchy,

becoming Dean of Canterbury Cathedral in 1625.

It might well be asked how the Bargar family succeeded in
achieving these goals, which seem far beyond their yeoman sta-
tus. How, in particular, did they manage to secure the ecclesiasti-
cal patronage dispensed by the close-knit group of local gentry?
The answer must be that they were helped by their close connec-
tion, eventually ratified by marriage, with one of the leading
families of Kent — and one that faithfully reflected the Kentish
pattern of endlessly ramifying branches, extending over a large
section of the county. When Thomas Bargrave exchanged his
living of Eythome for that of Sevington in 1614, he remained
within the sphere of patronage exerted by the ancient family of
Boys: Eythorne adjoined Fredville, the seat of the redoubtable Sir
John Boys — still “frowning hard” (as the Pevsner guide puts it)
from his effigy in the North Aisle of Canterbury Cathedral -
while Sevington was the parish in which cousins of Sir John
completed the building of their “Boys Hall” around 1616.20

What can have been the original connection between the Boys
and Bargar families? Willesborough, home of the scapegrace
Elizabeth Bargrave and the tanner Robert (surely a relation of
Robert of Bridge if not the selfsame person) is next door to Sev-
ington. It looks as if the entry of John and Isaac to Clare may
already betoken a link with this grand local family, asjohn Boys
became a fellow of this college in 1592. All in all, it seems more
than likely that there had been close contact for a number of

30

Rise and Fall of the House of Bargrave

years, when the seal was set on the relationship by the marriage
of John Boys (of the Eythome branch) with lngel, or Angela,
Bargar, daughter of Robert, on 4 October 1604.21

With this marriage alliance, contracted four years after the
death of Robert Bargar of Bridge, the family became members of
the close-knit group of gentry, mostly of medieval Kentish origin,
who dominated the life of East Kent, and regarded its ecclesiasti-
cal, as well as its civil, offices to be within their own gift. For Isaac
Bargar, the youngest and most able son, who was thus able to take
particular advantage of his family’s ascent, the path to preferment
lay open. He cannot have resided much at Eythome and, in 1615
(the year after his appointment to. the living), was still in Cam-
bridge, performing a leading role in the Latin play Ignoramus
before King James 1.22 He spent the years 1616-18 in Venice,
as chaplain to the English ambassador, Sir Henry Wotton, who
was himself of the ancient Kentish family that had produced the
first dean of the Cathedral Foundation, Nicholas Wotton.23 On
1 October 1618, after his return from Venice, he married a cousin of
the Wottons, Elizabeth Dering. The following year, his brother-
in-lavv, john Boys, was elected Dean of Canterbury, an office
in which Isaac was to succeed him only six years later (figs. 9
and 11).

But to follow Isaac’s career in the church is to neglect the no
less remarkable rise of his eldest brother, John, a decade before.
Laslett states that: “The gentry of Kent had always been pecu-
liarly closely bound to the city of London.”2" John Bargar fol-
lowed the pattern by marrying, in 1597, the daughter and
coheiress of a prosperous London haberdasher, Giles Crouch (or
Crowche) who lived in Cornhill.25 The Crouch family was, how-
ever, armigerous, and Jane Crouch’s other two sisters married
into the gentry, her youngest sister, Anne, marrying “Henry
Archer of Gray’s Inn, Midx., Gent,” and her middle sister, Sarah,
Sir Anthony Hungerford, of an illustrious Berkshire family that
was to provide both Royalist and Parliamentary commanders in
the Civil War.25

John Bargar, or Bargrave (as he was definitively to style himself
from 1611 onward), is the first figure in this family’s history from
whom it is possible to retrieve a little interiority, a dimension of

31


Under the Sign

his seven remaining children, after Robert, were baptized at Pa-
trixbourne, Sarah (fifth in line) was baptized at Tilmanstone in

1607 and john, the future collector, at Nonington on 18 Novem-
ber 161o. These two villages, together with Eythorne (the seat of
john Boys’s family and future parish of both Thomas and Isaac

Bargrave), form a triangle just north of the Dover road and sug-
gest a continuing connection based on landholding and links

with the local gentry (see fig. 8).

It was, however, to be at Patrixbourne that john Bargrave
would establish the official seat of his family, when he received a
grant of arms from Camden in 1611. It is worth mentioning that
this was a particularly timely moment for the Bargrave (alias
Bargar) family to become armigerous. On 11 December 1609, the
Stuart court had celebrated an elaborate show of chivalric cere-
mony known, after the Prince of Wales and heir to the throne, as

“Prince Henry’s Barriers.”32 The “House of Chivalry" was shown
both ruined and restored, in what has been called an attempt “to
revitalize English knighthood.”33 But is there any reason to sup-
pose that this country landowner, who spent his summers as a
soldier and his winters as a student of “public business,” would
have been affected by this brief attempt to lend the monarchy a
chivalric mystique, which was to be halted abruptly by the death
of the prince in 1612?

We can keep this question in suspension for the moment,
while noting the fact that Bargrave’s newly granted arms seem to
have signaled, with a certain surprising transparency, the
different sources of his fortune and fame. The heraldic descrip-
tion is: “Or, on a pale gules a sword erect argent, hilted and
pomelled gold, on a chief azure three bezants. Crest: on a mount
vert a pheon gules between two laurel branches proper.”3‘* The
symbolism of the coat of arms that the younger john was to
flaunt so proudly, in his portraits painted at Rome and Siena, was
thus overridingly warlike. The “pheon” of the crest is an elabo-
rately styled conventional arrowhead, bordered with the laurels
that were customarily granted for military services. The erect
sword, though present as a “sword of maintenance” in civic arms
such as those of the cities of London and Haarlem, suggests in
the personal context a direct evocation of martial valor. The

34

Rise and Fall of the House of Bargrave

golden bezants, though they have been interpreted as referring
to booty or ransom money taken in the course of Bargrave’s
campaigns, could just as well be an allusion to the ample dowry
of the city merchants daughter, Jane Crouch.

It may appear whimsical to interpret a coat‘of arms in this way,
given that the symbols of heraldry are, by definition, conven-
tional terms, whose purpose is primarily to achieve differentia-
tion and recognition, rather than to broadcast the armigerous
holder’s self—estimate to the world. John Bargrave’s connection
with the herald Camden, secured through Sir Henry Wotton,
may have helped to obtain the grant in the first place, but it is
hardly likely (it may be held) that he would have determined the
heraldic scheme. Against this point, it can be argued that john
Bargrave the Elder was more than usually attentive to the power
of signs. Pomian’s semiophore-man, discussed in the previous
section, is qualified to mediate between the Visible and the Invis-
ible precisely because he withdraws objects from their utilitarian
purpose and constitutes them as semiophores. But the question
arises: Who is qualified to be a semiophore-man in a society in
which the feudal hierarchy is yielding to the hegemony of bour-
geois capitalism? Bargrave the Elder, I would suggest, saw his
passage from yeoman to gentle status precisely in these terms. As
a gentleman, he was qualified, indeed obliged, to express himself
by converting the utilitarian into the semiophoric.

The chief evidence for this suggestion lies, however, not in the
arms as such, but in the great house that Bargrave built for
himself in the parish of Patrixbourne, and which he called by the
name of Bifrons. The house itself, after leaving the Bargrave
family’s possession in 1661, passed through the hands of a num-
ber of families, underwent successive remodelings, and was fl-
nally demolished in the 19505.35 Its only vestige, apart from the
ground plan still visible in the Bifrons park, is the splendid
painting in the collection of the Yale Center for British Art,
which was originally thought to be of seventeenth-century ori-
gin but is now labeled “British School” and dated circa 1'/o5—1o.35
Bargrave’s building may have been enlarged and embellished by
John Taylor, who bought the estate in 1694 and is credited in his
memorial inscription with having “Rais’d a Beautiful Garden to

35

 


Under the Sign

self-revelation and perhaps self-fashioning that redeems the
rather arid catalogue of names and dates. And yet it is with the
name, and its standardization, that we are first of all concerned.
In the lists of arms granted by Camden, the noted historian and
herald, who was a close friend of Sir Henry Wotton, there are five
records of the grant made in September 1611 to “Bargraue alias
Bargar” and to “John Bargraue alias Barger of Patricksborne in
Kent.”27

What then was involved in this choice of name, which quickly
displaced its alias? In its etymology, the surname Bargar, or
Barger, is probably related to barge and so has lowly and stren-
uous connotations (perhaps recalling one of those “Gravesend
barges,” essential for journeying from Canterbury to London,
which the collector Bargrave uses to compare with an Italian

felucca in his College of Cardinals [38]). Bargrave, or Bargrove, is
more likely to be derived from a place name, and there are
several cognate examples of localities going under the same or
similar names in East Kent. In the Visitation of the County of Kent,
conducted in 1619 when the elder ]ohn’s prosperity was at its
height, he is listed in Philipott’s genealogy as “Johannes Bargrave,
de B’grave, in p’chia de Patricksborne” — John Bargrave, of Bar-
grave, in the parish of Patrixbourne ~ as if the proper name was
derived from a house or estate.”

Another curious factor in the overdetermination of this name
is ]ohn’s connection, through his marriage to Jane Crouch, to a
well-born and weighty scholar known under the name of john
Blagrave, who died in the year that Bargrave received his grant of
arms. john Blagrave, son of John Blagrave of Bullmarsh, near
Sunning in Berkshire, by Anne, daughter of Sir Anthony Hunger-
ford, had written treatises on navigation and (most recently) The
Art of Dyalling, or setting up sundials, published in 1609.29 He
described himself on the title page of this last work as “John
Blagrave of Reading, Gentleman, and Mathematician.”

Whether or notjohn Bargrave the elder was influenced by the
prestige of his distant family connection, there can be no doubt
of his wish to appear a scholar, in addition to his primary voca-
tion as a soldier, which he must have taken up several years after
his marriage to Jane Crouch in 1597. The evidence lies in the

32

Rise and Fall of the House of Bargrave

preamble to an extraordinary letter that he wrote to Lord Trea-
surer Middlesex in December 1623, which deserves to be quoted
in full:

Right hob“ after 10 yeares service in the warres in the summer
time, and in my study in the wynter, whereby in some measure
I informed my Judgment in publiq[e] buisinesse, and 7 yeares
since now latelie spent in observing the abuses of the Virginia
Company, and studdying the meanes to rectifie them, being
forced and necessitated to be an earnest follower, and studdyer
of the same by losse of my Estate, I may now Claime to myselfe
the right of being Maister in that art, Challenging all others that
shall oppose what I write, and makeing it good that it is impos-
sible for any one (that shall newly enter into the buisinesse) to
be able to setle this Plantacon. I will take this proposicon for
the ground of my maisterpiece, and proue by right reason (wch
Plato saith is the ground of pollicie) That honors, liberties, and
freedomes, togeather w‘h returne of profit, ordered to the
Workeing of out pollitique Ends, would plant Virginia, and
worke those effects wee all aimed at.3°

This revealing preamble, which immediately lets us into the
mind and the predicament of the elder john Bargrave, also en-
ables us to make a tentative chronology of his (and his family’s)
rise and first, albeit temporary, fall. The division of his past life
that is made in the preamble seems to date his war service,
doubtless as a mercenary in Flanders, to the years 1605 to 1615,
and his anxious preoccupation with the fortunes of the Virginia
Company to the years 1616 to 1623. This chronology was, how-
ever, interspersed with a further sequence of events that marked
the ascent of the Bargraves to their apparently firm position
within the minor gentry of East Kent.

John Bargrave the Elders marriage to Jane Crouch, with the
consequent accession of wealth, was in 1597, followed either in
1598 or in 1600 by the birth of their first son, Robert.31 The death
of his father released a further amount of wealth in 1600, though
the Kentish tenurial system of gavelkind meant that he did not,
as eldest son, inherit the whole estate, and he may at this point
have received the land in Patrixbourne, while his brothers and
sisters acquired the land and tannery in Bridge. Although five of

33


Under the Sign

john Bargrave the Elder was, of course, participating in a well-
established, though by this date somewhat old-fashioned, cus-
tom of ornamenting grand facades with mottoes and texts: the
Verses from the Bible, also in Latin, which adorn Castle Ashby in
Northamptonshire and date from 1624, are thought to be the last
major example. It does indeed appear that Bargrave was himself
freely adapting a biblical text for the purposes of architectural
display. The King James Bible translates Proverbs 14.1 in the fol-
lowing way: “Every wise woman buildeth her house: but the
foolish plucketh it down with her hands.” But to identify the
source of the motto is not to explain it. What did Bargrave mean
by it? Was he, as with his armorial bearings, endowing a sym-
bolic convention with a potent personal significance?

The implication of the motto is thatjane Crouch’s dowry built
up again what had earlier been “devastated.” One piece of evi-
dence suggests that this was indeed a literal description of what
had happened. Lawrence Stone mentions a letter written to Sir
Robert Cecil in the last years of the sixteenth century, in which

“john Bargar . . . claimed to have spent nearly £2,000 as gentle-
man volunteer in four expeditions under the Earl of Essex.”‘*1
The dates undoubtedly fit the career of our john Bargrave, who
could well have begun military service as a volunteer in the
period between his call to the Bar (1590) and his marriage to the
well—endowed Jane (1597). If so, and even allowing for the exag-
geration that Stone detects as a feature of such begging letters to
the Crown, it must be amply clear that the wealth and preten-
sions of the Bargar/Bargrave family went back more than a gener-
ation beyond John. Such a fact would accord with the otherwise
puzzling feature that not onlyjohn and his male heirs, but also
his siblings, soon began to bear the arms that he was granted in
1611. The grant made at that time is no longer on record at the
College of Arms. But such a use could have been justified if the
patent was worded as a confirmation — and hence as an acknowl-
edgment of gentility that had already been recognized at some
stage in the past.“

That Jane Crouch’s dowry saved the situation in 1597 seems
probable. Yet it could not play this role a second time. For Bar-
grave’s letter of December 1623, sent to the Lord Treasurer,

38

Rise and Fall of the House of Bargrave

denoted a situation in his finances that was already close to
desperate and would continue to deteriorate. It is not easy to
determine at what stage john Bargrave the Elder began to invest
heavily in the Virginia Company. But his connections with the
City of London and the County of Kent must have inclined him
in that direction. Laslett notes that, from the foundation of the
company in 1606, the Kentish gentry had begun to recreate their
“interrelationships . . . in the area of the James river.”43 Of john
Bargrave's brothers, Thomas, as mentioned previously, spent a
large part of his life as a church minister in Virginia,“ while a
further brother, George, married the daughter of an important
ship owner and pioneer planter, Captain John Martin. The rec-
ords of the Virginia Company contain a letter, dated 11]une 1618,
“concerning the venture of a pinnace to Virginia with john Bar-
grave.”‘*5 An entry of 17 May 1620 records a patent of indentures
for land in the Southampton hundred made out to “Cap. john
Bargrave and his associate.”45
It may well be that Bargrave’s substantial commitment to Vir-
ginia was only undertaken at this late date, even though he had
“observed the abuses” of the company since 1616. If so, he could
not have plunged in at a worse time. Around 1620, the affairs of
the company had resulted in a growing polarization between the
“court” and the “liberal” factions, the latter of which was to gain
ascendancy after Sir Edwin Sandys was reelected treasurer, to
King ]ames’s great displeasure.” Sandys was to encourage the
Pilgrim Fathers to choose Virginia as their place of settlement in
1620, and his dominance was antagonistic not only to the theo-
logical but also to the financial interests of john Bargrave, who
was forced to bring a lawsuit against the company “with refer-
ences to losses . . . by being prohibited from free trade in Vir-
ginia according to his patent.”‘*3 The year 1622 was a black date
in the history of the colony, since a massacre of the settlers by a
group of Native Americans led to a general crisis of confidence in
the future of the territory. But by this stage, Captain Bargrave (as
he is styled in the documents) was involved in a worsening
sequence of claims and counterclaims that necessitated his at-
tendance at the Court of the Virginia Company in February 1622
and led to him being recorded as in debt to the company one year
later, for the sum of “£512-1o—o.”‘*9

39


Under the Sign

Bifrons." On the other hand, as the memorial makes no mention
of architectural additions, it may well be that the house in the
painting remains substantially as Bargrave built it. In any event,
no one but Bargrave gave it the name that it was to retain
throughout its history: the enigmatic and possibly significant
name of Bifrons (fig. 10).

What was the origin and meaning of this name? The Latin
word bifrons simply means “double-fronted” — an architectural
term cognate with the “quadrifrons,” or triumphal arch facing
four ways, which the Romans had erected at Richborough, near
Sandwich, as a monument to their landing in Britain (“Accessus
Britanniae”). Although the painting obviously only shows one
facade in full, it is possible to deduce from it that john Bargrave
the Elder’s fine new house had two contrasting facades, one
opening onto a garden and the other no doubt providing access
for coaches.37 But it is worth pursuing this interpretation fur-
ther. Bifrons was a customary epithet for the Latin deity Janus,
the door to whose temple was traditionally closed when the
Roman Empire was enjoying a universal peace. This was a mean-
ing well understood by Bargrave’s contemporaries; the poet
Thomas Carew celebrated Charles I’s peace with Spain in 1629
with a poem incorporating the following lines:

But, Byfront, open thou no more,
In his blest raigne, the temple dore.33

Given that John Bargrave the Elder had ceased his “1o yeares
service in the warres” around 1615, it seems more than likely that
he chose to invest the term Bifrons with this special significance.
It was to be not only a house of original design but one whose
design and name bespoke the fact that the soldier who had won
his coat of arms in 1611 was retiring from the wars and devoting
himself to more peaceful pursuits. I have to admit that there is no
evidence that Bifrons was ever interpreted in this way. Nonethe-
less, when the younger John Bargrave and his traveling compa-
nions visited that paragon of modern house design, Palladio’s
Villa Rotunda near Vicenza, their account records how inap-
propriate it was to compare it to the Pantheon: “in my opinion it
more resembles the Temple of Janus Quadrifrons, for it hath foure
faces and foure Gates” (MI 225). It is no surprise that the three

36

Rise and Fall of the House of Bargrave

travelers who were all familiar with the splendid new house at
Patrixbourne would have had this particular comparison ready
to mind.

There were also good reasons why the optimistic life plan and
the symbolic program of John Bargrave the Elder should have
both turned sour in retrospect, as the ascent of the 1610s was
followed by a harrowing decline in the 16205. The year of the
heraldic Visitation of john Philipott, Rouge Dragon, 1619, marks
the acme of his fortunes. The house was now built, and a copy of

.Philipott’s documentation (transcribed in the hand of the eigh-
teenth-century Kentish historian I-lasted) records triumphantly
under the genealogical entry of “johannis Bargrave”: “aedificavit
Bifrons in Far. de Patricksborne Ar” (He built Bifrons in the
Parish of Patrixbourne. Armiger). More evidence of the heraldic
splendor displayed in the new seat is contained in Sir Henry St.
Georges Visitation of London in the early 1630s, when the line of
Bargrave’s father-in-lavv, Giles Crouch of Cornhill, was also scruti-
nized. “Jane da. of Giles Crouch wife tojohn Bargrave of Bifrons”
is listed and a note appended to the wealthy haberdasher’s blazon
records: “The Armes of Giles Crouch as they are impaled with
John Bargrave who maried his daughter which Mr. Phillipott hath
seene.”39

Jane Bargrave, nee Crouch, was also the recipient of a more
direct tribute, and one that galvanized the attention of a scholar
like I-lasted, long after the estate of Bifrons had passed out of the
hands of the Bargrave family. He notes in his History of Kent that

“the builder of [Bifrons] , in commendation of his wife, placed this
motto on the fore front: Dimta aedificat uxor bona, aedificata
diruit mala.”4° No material traces or (as far as can be determined)
visual records exist of this striking inscription, which must have
been placed (as I-lasted implies) on the facade that remains invis-
ible in the painting: A good wife builds up what has been devas-
tated, a bad wife devastates what has been built up. Granted that
the form of the text must have been to some extent determined
by the binary symmetry of the facade, it is at the same time a
slightly enigmatic, even disquieting, tribute to the ample dowry
and sterling personal qualities of Jane Crouch. In what sense
might she have been “building up what has been devastated?”

37


Under the Sign

the armigerous status that he had acquired, with rising expecta-
tions, two decades before.

Yet there is one dividend, from our point of view, of John
Bargrave’s long and distressing ordeal. This is the series of trea-
tises on the government of Virginia, no less than five in all, that
he composed in a fruitless attempt to prevail upon the King to
become more directly concerned in the government of the ailing
colony. These works of political science, though far from un-
known, have rarely been taken seriously. Charles M. Andrews
refers disparagingly to Bargrave as a “persistent constitution-
monger,” in his history of the Colonial Period.“ The biographer
of George Sandys, a relative of Bargrave’s opponent, describes
him as “a minor Virginia planter . . . evidently personally quite
eccentric.”-‘37 In both of these cases, we might say, the historians
chosen subject leads them to dismiss Bargrave with scant atten-
tion: he was, as Andrews remarks, “an ardent believer in the
divine right of kings.”

But the fact that Bargrave was on the losing side, both in his
disputes with the Virginia Company and in his prognostications
for the future of the American colonies, should not blind us to
the intrinsic interest of his proposals. His scheme for Virginia is
the fruit of the long periods of retirement in his study, during the
winter months, referring as it does to Plato and to examples from
Greek and Roman history. But it is also the fruit of his military
service in the Low Countries and his meditation on the fortunes
of contemporary rulers. Of his central aim, which is to “tie Vir-
ginia as fast to England as if it were one Terra firma wth it,” he
states: “The hinte of it I had from Charles the 5th, and if he
himselfe or King Philip his sonne, had vsed the like policie in the
West Indyes, low Countries, Millaine, Naples, and the rest of his
provinces to Mayntayne his Soveraignetye there, he had not
spent so many Millions to keep Garrisons as he hath done,
neither would his provinces be so readie to fall from him as now
they wilbe if his plate fleet should faile him.”53

The essence of Bargrave’s “polisie” is thus to annihilate the
factor of geographical difference. His motto might have been: As
in Kent, so in Virginia. Yet it is not merely an abstract principle
that is being vindicated. Bargrave himself volunteers to lead “a

42

Rise and Fall of the House of Bargrave

sufficient Nomber of men that haue good Estates here to plant in
Virginia.” His own interest as a virtual bankrupt is amply evident
in his reminder that junius Brutus, after the Battle of Cannae,

“was forced for want of men to set at liberty all the prisoners
indebted, and to discharge their debte on Condicon, that they
would serue the State. . . .” In addition, however, to offering

“helpe for some industrious Gentlemen indebted; and decaying in
their Estate,” Bargrave proposes nothing less than a comprehen-
sive form of government, whose indissolubility from the English
Crown is secured through bold and experimental social policies.
The key to his proposal is that enough “patriots" should be
found, “haveing good estates in England,” who will settle in the
colony with a retinue of three hundred men each.59 But, having
crossed the ocean, the patriots and their dependents create a
society in which merit, rather than preexisting privilege, is the
prevailing norm:

. . wee wish that the heires and eldest sonnes of the upper
orders may marrie with the daughters of the lower orders, soe
to rayse their wives fortunes. And that the daughteres of the
upper orders being heires may marrye with the sonnes of the
lower orders, makeing choice of the most vertuous, soe as
vertue may advance both men and woemen to marriages, and
that all degrees may bee thereby bound togeather in the bonds
of love that none may be scorned but the scorner.5°

Bargrave‘s lengthy recommendations, which can only be briefly
evoked here, range from Utopian social engineering, as above, to
points of incongruously precise detail, such as the provision of
large flat-bottomed vessels, “like those they tearme flutes in the
Low Countries, that in transporteing our men they may laye
drye in them till their houses are made or built.” They even
include provisions that betoken a certain knowledge of the
mathematical sciences, as when he lists the sixty permutations of
three terms that will ensure that “the same 3 men shall not in 5
yeares space meete togeather to bee presidentes” of the ruling
council.“ But the fundamental feature remains the fact that this
experimental, irenic community should in no way diverge from
the monarchical government of Britain, as the Puritan faction
was already tending to do. Bargrave stipulates:

43


Under the Sign

How had Bargrave financed his Virginian enterprises? It seems
likely that, after Bifrons was built, he had decided that an aggres-
sive mercantile strategy was necessary to raise his family further
in the social scale, as their splendid new house warranted. It is
also probable that, by this stage, Jane Crouch’s dowry had been
entirely laid out, in the consolidation of the estate and the build-
ing of the house. Bargrave must have borrowed money, or en-
tered into an agreement of deferred payment, to support his
ventures, and, in the mid—162os, the pigeon came home to roost.
The “loss of my Estate” mentioned in the letter to the Lord
Treasurer is quantified in a contemporary petition at the truly
enormous sum of 6000 pounds. If this was the amount of Bar-
grave’s counterclaim, calculated on the amount he had lost
through miscarriages of government in the colony, the sum owed
to the Virginia Company was both real and substantial.

The Court of the Company being unable to settle the dispute,
the suit was passed on to the King's Privy Council, which ini-
tially commented “how weakely they found the same [complaint]
grounded one the said Bargrave’s parte” and ordered him to “for-
beare from troubling any farther his Majestie or the Boarde with
this cause.”5° Bargrave responded immediately with a “humble
petition,” which led them to modify their harshness: “shewing
that by reason of greate losses and decay of his estate, whereunto
he is fallen by misadventure and ill successe of some former
good endeavours of his tending to publique service, [he] is now
become farr indebted and much pressed by hard and greedy
creditors, to the utter mine of himself and his family.”51 The
point about the “publique service,” which Bargrave had rendered
in his Virginian ventures, was obviously received with some
degree of sympathy by the council, who alluded to it in their
judgment, together with a now astronomical estimate of the total
losses:

Whereas John Bargrave, esquire, hath made humble suit unto

us shewing that being growne into debt to the summe of 7500

li., for the discharging whereof and of his suerties he is willing

to tender his whole estate liable to the said debt unto his credi-

tors, and hath therefore bin a suitor unto us to write our letters

unto some persons of qualitie, to call before them his creditors

40

Rise and Fall of the House of Bargrave

and suerties, and to take order between them for the good of
both the parties and satisfaction of his said creditors and
discharge of his suerties out of his estate, which is in land;
however we are very cautious to intermeddle in business of this
kind, yet in regard that we have taken notice of the great
damages which the said john Bargrave hath of late received in
his estate, which he both adventured in courses in themselves
verie commendable and tending much to the advancement of
the publique good. . . .52

The upshot of this wordy judgment is therefore that the de-
mands of Bargrave’s creditors, which must have become impor-
tunate, were staved off, so that the bankruptcy (since that, in
anachronistic terms, is what it was) could be managed in an
orderly way. Only as late as 26 June 1624 was the protection
granted in the name of the king finally removed at the behest of
one Willyam Wilkes, who was owed 200 pounds: “their Lord-
ships have ordered that there shall be no further order bee entred
for mooving his Majestie to renewe the said protection again.’’53
How, if at all, did john Bargrave the Elder raise these large
sums of money, secured against his landed estate? The revenue
of Bifrons has been estimated at £190 per year,54 and though this
figure probably relates to a period two decades after the catas-
trophe, there is no doubt that payment’ in full of the sum of
£7500 would have ruined him. Did he sell land that he had
inherited from his father and maybe borrow from his newly
acquired cousins among the gentry of East Kent? It is impossible
to say. But what is quite certain is that the household at Bifrons,
so cheerfully arrayed for Philipott’s Visitation of 1619, must have
been blighted by the events of 1622--24. It is doubtful whether

_]ohn Bargrave the Elder can ever have recovered from the drastic

reversal of his fortunes. The last occasion on which his name is
mentioned in official papers is a pathetic one: on 31 May 1630, he
sends his servant to the Privy Council to account for his failure
to find “such Armes as he is charged with” and undertakes by
proxy “to attend the Lord Chamberlaine, Lord Lieutenant of the
County of Kent.”55 Whether because of continuing financial
embarrassment or because he was a broken man, or for both
reasons, john Bargrave had failed to live up to the obligation of

41


Under the Sign

that from the time that the patriot shall bee planted abroade,
his estate of inheritance in England, togeather with -his

honoures titles and inheritance in Virginea, shall bee soe

united and made one to him and his heires that he shall not sell

the one without the other, and that sale to bee made by the

consent of our councell of union in Virginea and our Virginea

councell in England. . . .52

Bargrave‘s proposal probably did not get past the Lord Treasurer,
Lionel Cranfield, whose “practical and mercantile mind” (it has
been suggested) would not have warmed to it.53 The fact that it
made any headway at all was due to the acrimonious debate
within the Virginia Company around 1623, when Sir Nathaniel
Rich, a kinsman of the Earl of Warwick, seems to have viewed the
proposal as a useful weapon against the Puritan faction.“ But
this should not be allowed to obscure the historical interest of the
elder BargraVe’s vision of a New World, where “the heades of
thease colonies are sparkes derived from our hereditorie mon-
archie.”55 As his proposals have always been viewed in connec-
tion with the history of the Virginia Company, and thus pro-
leptically as reactionary ideas with no relevance to the future
development of the United States, their relevance to the immedi-
ate context from which they sprang has been neglected.

It is, indeed, in the article by Peter Laslett that has previously
been quoted, that Bargrave’s ideas find a special resonance, by
virtue of the fact that they originated in early seventeenth-cen-
tury Kent. As Laslett notes: “Patriarchalism and the patriarchal
family did more than hold together the county communities:
they bound town and country together and made possible emi-
gration overseas.”55 Kent, during this period, was the paradigm
case of a general rule that bound the county to the Crown, and
the Crown, by way of the county, to the new communities being
founded overseas. Of course, Laslett is making his case for the
special patriarchal character of Kent in order to give a context to
one of the most surprising and influential political texts of the
seventeenth century, yet one that must have been, at the time of
writing, as obscure as Bargravé’s series of proposals — the Patri-
archa of Sir Robert Filmer. He is explaining why a Kentish gentle-
man living in seclusion near Maidstone (surrounded, however,

44

Rise and Fall of the House of Bargrave

by cousins and connections) should have produced a treatise on
patriarchal government whose message rapidly took fire after the
Civil War, when it became one of the main political alternatives
to the contractual theory of government developed by Locke. He
is outlining a far-reaching, and highly surprising, destiny for
Filmer’s analogy between the family and the state:
Such then were the gentry of Kent in 1640. The most charac-
teristic thing they produced was the political thinking of Sir
Robert Filmer and the most surprising was the society of the
Old South in the United States.57

It would be absurd to pit Bargrave’s proposals for Virginia against
Filmer’s more sophisticated and intellectually coherent argu-
ments. Nevertheless, the context outlined by Laslett applies to
both Bargrave and Filmer. Indeed, the recent redating of Filmer’s
writings pushes them back, from the eve of the Civil War, to the
period around 1630, which is only a few years removed from Bar-
grave’s “constitution-mongering”63 No direct connection need be
proved between the two Kentish gentlemen. But at least it may be
asserted that, in his defiantly patriarchal vision of Kent and Vir-
ginia, john Bargrave the Elder was no less “characteristic.”

21+’

This is part of the story that lies behind the memorial inscription

in Patrixbourne Church, composed by john Bargrave the Youn-
ger. Being born in 1610, he must have witnessed the early splen-
dor of the family: his father’s return from the wars, and the

gradual construction, over several years, of the great house of

Bifrons. He must have been able to range over it and discover its

innermost recesses, just at the time when a child leaves infancy

and begins to explore the outside world for himself. He must

have seen the heraldic shields of Bargrave impaling Crouch, the

badge of his own armigerous status, and the perplexing inscrip-
tion that recorded his mother’s virtues across one facade of the

double-fronted building. Then, as he began to enter adolescence,
he must have observed the increasing disarray and disturbance

at Bifrons: his father now more often than not absent, once again,
as he pursued his suit in London, and his mother incapable, in

these sad circumstances, of repairing the devastation of the

House of Bargrave.

45


Under the Sign

One small historical detail refers, obliquely, to his situation
during these years. It comes from the last travelers account that
John Bargrave the Younger wrote, in 1675, when, as Receiver-
General of the revenues of the Dean and Chapter, he set out to
make a thorough survey of the Cathedral estates. With reference
to the “Chartham Mantion or Deanery,” which had traditionally
been the country residence of the head of the foundation, he
reminisced:

When my uncle Dean Boyne [sic] lived there, I used to goe
thither on Saturday night and come back to School on Monday
mornings. Then there was a large Pond and a handsome Moate
rownd abowt the house full of Trowts, with a boate and a nett
to fish the ponde, in which was kept 2 swans that had their nest
among the Reeds, now that and the Moate is allmost all quite
dry.59
john Bargrave was at the Kings School, in the close of Canter-
bury Cathedral, between 1623 and 1626, and his aunt’s husband,
John Boys, died at the end of 1625. The otherwise purely practi-
cal jottings of the Receiver-General here open up a little, so that
through the chink we can observe an idyllic episode in his early
adolescence. But why was the idyll so compelling? If john was
the guest of his uncle and aunt at weekends, this can only have
been because it was impossible for him to go home to Bifrons.
Patrixbourne and Chartham are roughly equidistant from Can-
terbury, and both are within easy walking distance. The inescap-
able conclusion seems to be that, during these years of crisis in
his fathers fortunes, Bifrons was shut up, or at least a place
where one further child would have been an additional burden.
john had at least four sisters, some of them of marriageable age,
and it is possible that they, and his mother, were boarded out on
other relatives.

The Patrixbourne inscription, in its laconic generality, could
be seen as subsuming this early experience of dispossession as
well as the later, definitive sale of the estate. “Stetit et cecidit
familia.” Yet was it in fact the family’s participation in the Civil
War that caused its downfall? One of the most surprising things
about the history of the Bargrave family is that, after the brief
entry of 1630 relating to his failure to find arms, there is no

46

.. .,, ..,._.__,,._._‘

Rise and Fall of the House of Bargrave

mention of john the Elder nor, indeed, of his wife. He would
have been seventy in 1640, on the eve of the Civil War, and it is
highly unlikely that he would have borne arms in the Kentish
uprisings that led to the disastrous Battle of Maidstone in 1648. If
he did linger on, throughthe 16305 and 1640s, it would have been
as an old and, no doubt, broken man, taking little part in the
great events of the times or, indeed, in the future of his family.
These speculations are underlined, if not positively con-
firmed, by the fact that the eldest son of the family, Robert Bar-
grave, did in fact noticeably take the helm and succeeded in
restoring Bifrons and the Bargrave family to their respectable
position, for a brief period. He did it, as his father had done
before him, by going to the wars and by marrying a rich wife. A
document of the Privy Council, dated 31]uly 1627, shows him to
be in command of “the good shipp, called the Loyaltie” and
“appointed to goe to Plymouth for the embarqueing and trans-
porting of zoo souldiers to be sent over to the Isle of ]ersey.”7°
Captain Robert Bargrave was thus involved in the ferrying and
provisioning of troops that were making their way, via the Eng-
lish island of jersey, to the ill-fated expedition against the French
at Ile de Ré. Even in this assignment, it seems possible that he
was benefiting from his Kentish connections, however, as the
Governor of jersey at this time was Sir john Peyton, a cousin of
Sir Thomas Peyton of Knowlton.
ln 1635, Robert Bargrave of Bifrons married Elizabeth Peyton,
sister of Sir Thomas and daughter of Sir Samuel Peyton, in Can-
terbury Cathedral. The alliance with this ancient and illustrious
family, which originated in the Isle of Ely and numbered no less
than four baronets among the heads of its branches, gave the
Bargraves a new cousinage among the prominent gentry of East
Kent and must have brought at the same time a substantial
dowry.“ On 13 September 1638, we find Robert writing to his
sister-in-law, Anne Oxinden, at Denton House, with the news
that he is and his wife are about “to make a Christian of a young
man yt is come abroade into ye world,” and inviting them to
come to “a shorte Dinner” and celebrate.” Perhaps this is also
the boy child about whom he writes to the same correspondent
in a rather more solemn vein, when the baby is “weake and

47


Under the Sign

froward” and needs the continuing presence of the wet nurse
found by Anne Oxinden.73 If so, it could be the luckless John
Bargrave of the Patrixboume inscription, “haeres a minis in
Ruinas,” who was already showing his lack of robustness. ‘

No mention is made of the elderjohn Bargrave, the founder of
Bifrons, in this correspondence. Robert, who had taken the
Christian name of his grandfather, the yeoman and tanner of
Bridge, just as he was to give his eldest son his fathers name of
john, acts as the head of the family. By 1641, he is ajustice of the
Peace, as we may judge from the long letter written to him by his
brother-in-lavv, Henry Oxinden, recommending clemency for

“Goodwife Gilnot," who has been accused of witchcraft.” In
1648, it must undoubtedly be Robert, and not his father, who
plays a decisive role in the Kentish uprising in support of King
Charles 1. Matthew Carter’s contemporary account tells how the
insurgent Kentish men march to the coast, with the aim of estab-
lishing a liaison with the navy, “leaving in Deale Anthony Ha-
mond, Esq. and Cap. Bargrave, who had formerly been an officer
of the Navie; (both justices of the Peace, and gallant discreet
men) . . . as Commissioners for the managing of the businesse
there, and in the Fleet.”75 Because of this prior assignment,
Robert Bargrave probably missed the slaughter of the Battle of
Maidstone.

It would, however, be a mistake to try to drive a wedge be-
tween the younger Captain Bargrave and his father, veteran of
the Spanish wars and unsuccessful propagandist for a patriarchal
Virginia. Even Robert Bargrave’s negotiations with the navy,
which hinged on the possibility that, at this crucial stage in the
Civil War, the naval command might have made common cause
with the disaffected Royalist gentry of the southeastern counties,
must have been directed at the ambiguous person of the Earl of
Warwick, their commander—in—chief and the leader of the faction
with whom his father had ingratiated himself in pursuing his
Virginian business. Roberts royalism was patriarchal, and the

network of connections that he developed was evidently an am-

plification of his father's.
The most curious and unsettling aspect of the Patrixboume
inscription may therefore be accounted for, though much of the

48

Rise and Fall of the House of Bargrave

reasoning behind my contention is inevitably based on specula-
tion. No dates are given for ‘the deaths of John the Elder and
Robert or, indeed, for those of their wives: even the “Uxor bona”
is without a name. The obvious point is thatjohn Bargrave and
his wife,]ane Crouch, had never had a conventional tomb erec-
ted as a memorial: their bodies had been placed in the Bifrons
vault, whichjohn (in the time of his prosperity) had purchased
for his family, but the individual ruin of the family and the
general ruin of the Civil War had prevented this public acknowl-
edgment of their virtues and their parentage. If we suppose that
they died as late as the early 1640s, then it is easy to see that
Roberts brief period of prosperity, for less than a decade after his
marriage to Elizabeth Peyton, would not have been adequate for
the planning and construction of a monument to the founder of
Bifrons.

It is therefore left to john the Younger to make a simple act of
restitution, now that his brother and sister-in-law have also van-
ished, in the last years of the Interregnum. His inscription con-
flates the generations; it is written in the patriarchal mode, to
which the fate of the women must be merely subsidiary. It con-
denses the boys vivid and unsettling experience of his family’s
first overwhelming crisis into the man’s more mature awareness
of the long and devastating Civil War. Above all, it registers and
laments the loss of Bifrons, with its impotent heir, from the point
of view of a mourner who is also the writer of the inscription,
and therefore confirms his own identity in the very act of moum—
ing. In announcing that he, as mourner and writer, is also a
prebendary of the Church of Christ at Canterbury, it deflects our
attention, finally, from the abandoned House of Bifrons to the
enduring monument whose Tudor tower is just visible in the
eighteenth—century painting of the now alienated estate.

By 1663, then,]ohn Bargrave the Younger’s stake was not in the
family estate but, rather in the community of the Dean and
Chapter, eventually heirs to his collection. But he had made the
choice many years before — and indeed the choice had already
been made for him — when he was launched on an academic and
clerical career. As mentioned before, with reference to his uncle
Isaac, it was the custom of prosperous Kentish families to steer

49


Under the Sign

the intellectually disposed younger sons in the direction of the
church. Kent, with its traditional tenure of gavelkind, had been
the exception among English counties in favoring a more equal
distribution of family wealth without regard to primogeniture.
But even in Kent, the tendency in the early seventeenth century
was toward the “disgaveling” of land, despite the opposition of
Parliament. john Bargrave the Elders decision to establish his
family seat in Patrixbourne, rather than Bridge, may well have
been influenced by the fact that the land in this parish was held
in socage (ie, by knight service) and so not liable to gavel-
kind.75 Certainly, the crisis in his fortunes and the responsibility
placed upon Robert to marry advantageously and establish the
Bifrons line would have dispensed john the Younger from any
continuing interest in the estate. After his period at the King’s
School, which ended in 1626, there is an unexplained gap of
more than two years in his biography, during which he may well
have begun his travels on the other side of the Channel.77 But on
8july 1629, he was admitted to Peterhouse, Cambridge; he was
to remain there, gradually climbing the collegiate hierarchy, until
his ejection in 1644.73

Bargraves fifteen years at Peterhouse require us to look more
closely at the ecclesiastical politics of the period preceding the
Civil War, in which the University of Cambridge was deeply
implicated. It would, however, be a mistake to suppose that the
ideological conflicts that he witnessed in that academic com-
munity were unrelated to the issues that were already resound-
ing in his own family and that his fathers strenuous defense of
patriarchal government against the Puritan faction in the Vir-
ginia Company found no echo in the debates that divided the
Cambridge scholars. Quite the reverse, the ideas defended by the
elder Bargrave become comprehensible when they too are placed
in a much wider intellectual and political context. The polariza-
tion of factions in the Virginia Company around 1620 was itself a
symptom of a radical polarization that was taking place in those
years not only in England, but in the whole of northern Europe,
and particularly in those territories that the elder Bargrave’s war
service had familiarized him with. As Hugh Trevor-Roper has
outlined, the year 1618 saw a gathering of “storm-clouds” first of

50

J x

Rise and Fall of the House of Bargrave

all in Central Europe and then, by inevitable contagion, in the
Netherlands, where the moderate voices of Grotius and Olden-
barnevelt were overwhelmed in the growing cacophony of war-
ring Catholics and Calvinists. The Synod of Dordt, in 1619, re-
sulted in the ascendancy of the rigid Calvinists over the so-called
Arminians, who had defended a middle way between the fac-
tions. It could not fail to have immediate repercussions in En-
gland, since the Elizabethan consensus was also essentially a
middle way and therefore vulnerable both to the attacks of radi-
cal Calvinism and to the inevitable tendency of anti-Calvinism to
acquire itself, in the acrimony of dispute, an extreme character. 79
Looking back from a period less prone to contention, at least
in religious matters, T. S. Eliot praised and endorsed the “via
media,” which was for him “the spirit of Anglicanism,” and asso-
ciated its virtues with two figures in particular: Richard Hooker
and Lancelot Andrewes.8° There is good reason to suppose that
Isaac and john, the two Bargrave churchmen, would have been
permeated by the good sense and distaste for fanaticism that
characterized these two substantial writers and teachers. Richard
Hooker, indeed, had spent the last years of his life in retirement
as Rector of Bishopsbourne, the village adjacent to Bridge. As
Alan Everitt has put it, referring to two leading gentlemen of the
Civil War period in Kent: “The appeal of Hooker’s Ecclesiastical
Polity . . . to history, law, and reason as well as the literal teach-
ing of the Bible powerfully attracted men of the antiquarian cast
of Dering and Twysden.”31 Isaac Bargrave, of course, had mar-
ried a member of the Dering family and, as we shall see, shared

A fully in the antifundamentalist ethos that Hooker had succeeded

in diffusing throughout the English church, but especially in his
own county.

Lancelot Andrewes was active in another sphere, ultimately as
Bishop of Chichester and then Winchester, but for the first part
of his life particularly in the University of Cambridge. H. C.
Porter’s account of religious life in Tudor Cambridge notes
Hooker’s memorable writings “on the theme of order” and points
out that “such a conception of the Christian world picture was
being . . . popularly expounded in the Cambridge of the early
1580s,” when Andrewes was achieving intellectual maturity.“

51


Under the Sign

But if Andrewes’s writings considered the orderly nature of the

universe on a philosophical level, stressing (as Porter points out)

the “correspondence of musical consonance and the harmony of
God’s universe,” his views inevitably became associated with a

more practical tendency in churchmanship, “which led to an

enhanced ceremonialism in worship and high claims for episco-
pacy as the indispensable sign of a true Church.”33

Lancelot Andrewes was no longer at Cambridge when Isaac
Bargrave went up to the university in the early 1600s. But his
influence was still especially strong in Pembroke College, where
he had matriculated in 1571 and held the office of Master for six
years, ending in 1595. It was from Pembroke that Isaac gained his
B.A. degree in I6o6—7,3" before going on to Clare in the steps of
his brother—in—law,]ohn Boys. It was also at Pembroke that Isaac
formed a close friendship with the pupil and spiritual successor
of Lancelot Andrewes, Matthew Wren, the future Bishop of Ely
and uncle of the architect Sir Christopher. Their two careers ran
parallel, at least at the early stages, with both becoming chap-
lains to the Prince of Wales (the future Charles I): in 1625, when
Isaac Bargrave became Dean of Canterbury, Matthew Wren was
elected Master of the adjoining college to Pembroke, Peterhouse.
He was in office in 1629, when his friends nephew, john Bar-
grave, was admitted, and remained until 1634, when he was
made Bishop of Hereford.

Isaac Bargrave was therefore qualified, by virtue of his Kentish
and his Cambridge connections, in the via media of Elizabethan
Anglicanism. His horizons were, however, to be expanded to a
European scale by the patronage of the Kentish gentleman and
luminary Sir Henry Wotton, for which he was probably indebted
(as he was for the living of Eythorne) to the Boys connection. Sir
Henry, who was British Ambassador to the Republic of Venice for
a large part of the first twenty years of the century, seems to have
taken special care in his selection of young and promising clerics
to add to his suite. His first choice, arriving in April 1607, was
William Bedell, future bishop of the Irish diocese of Kilmore and
noted Anglican divine.85 Isaac Bargrave was chosen to join the
embassy nearly ten years later and stayed till 1618, when he
returned to marry Elizabeth Dering. A letter from Matthew Wren

52

Rise and Fall of the House of Bargrave

to his “very faithful and dear friend,” then spending time among
the Venetians, is dated August 1616.86

Isaac Bargrave’s Venetian stay not only earned him the com-
mendation of Sir Henry Wotton, who sent him back with letters
of introduction to King James I, but also vividly illuminated the
religious and political situation in Europe as a whole, which was
to be the framework for his own, subsequent career in the Eng-
lish church. Bedell, the first chaplain, had been in Venice when,
on 5 October 1607, the assassins sent by the Pope tried to murder
the famous “Chiefe Counsellour of the Signory of Venice in
Affaires Ecclesiasticall,” Paolo Sarpi (usually known as Father
Paulo). Sarpi, whose History of the Council of Trent had chal-
lenged the legitimacy and authority of the papacy of the Counter-
Reformation, was a liberal churchman benefiting from the re-
laxed policies of the Venetian Senate, and he was also a close
friend and ally of Sir Henry Wo tton, who saw in the political and
ecclesiastical autonomy of Venice a strong asset for British for-
eign policy.

Isaac Bargrave’s association with Father Paulo, who luckily
escaped his assassins, is celebrated in a manuscript sketch of his
life that also catalogues its future successes and its final sad
irony. Here he is described as “a Gentleman of an unwearied
study, great travels, intimate acquaintance with Padre Paulo of
Venice, who told him that the Doctrine and Discipline of the
Church of England were Ye most primitive of any in the World.”37

In this expansive claim, made by the Venetian historian, scientist »

and antipapal propagandist to the young English embassy chap-
lain, we can gauge the ecumenical promise of those years, before
the Synod of Dordt, when the Anglican conception of a via media
seemed to find responsive echoes throughout Europe. We can
sense the real, though elusive, attraction of a view of contempo-
rary politics and statecraft that relegated simultaneously the
predatory designs of the post—Tridentine papacy and the narrow
preoccupations of militant Calvinism. If Isaac was to be capti-
vated by this vision in his youth, his nephew John, who reached
intellectual maturity at at a time when the Anglican position had
been thoroughly undermined by events in England and Europe,
turned it into an image of mythic fixity As we shall see, it betrays

S3


Under the Sign

itself in the fact that, however strongly he repudiates the Puritan
regicides, he places them no higher in his demonology than the
emissaries of Rome.

To the young john Bargrave, the brilliant ecclesiastical career
of his uncle Isaac must have appeared, as he attended school and
university, a fortunate counterexample to his fathers financial
imbroglio, though he must also have been increasingly aware of
the hostility to 1saac’s style of churchmanship. To quote from the
manuscript memoir again: he was “of great esteem with the
Parliament 1622. 1623. 1624. 1626. 1627. 1628. who took the sacra-
ment constantly at his hands at St Margaret’s Westm[inster]
where he was many years the faithfull Minister; and Advice from
his mouth often at Convocation whereof he was several times an
eminent and active member.”83 True to the example of Lancelot
Andrewes, and to his brother-in-law and patron Dean John Boys,
Isaac was a powerful speaker of sermons, who must have been
particularly at home in the parish church of the two houses of
parliament. Even though his brother john, in the early 1620s,
was pursuing his fruitless vendetta against the Puritan faction in
the Virginia Company, Isaac had learned enough in Venice to
recognize that the covert plans of the Catholic party posed no
less a threat to the integrity of government. As the memoir
claims: “He had suffered for his zeal in a sermon before the
Parliament 1623 . . . against Papery, Evil Counsellors, and Cor-
ruption.” The price of this outspoken sermon, which (unlike
other contemporary ones) seems not to have been authorized for
publication, was no doubt the high displeasure of the old King
James 1, who did not appreciate such direct and uncompromis-
ing advice.

Isaac Bargrave’s credit was saved by the change of monarch,
and the accession to the throne of Charles I in 1625 secured a
sudden acceleration in his career. Not only had he been chaplain
to the young king, but he was connected, through the Derings, to
the family of the mother of the royal favorite, the egregious Duke
of Buckingham.89 This makes the contemporary accusation that
he obtained the post of Dean of Canterbury, in 1625, by bribing
the duke more than plausible; even if no financial transaction
took place, it is certain that Buckingham’s credit with the King

54

Rise and Fall of the House of Bargrave

would have been drawn on for all that it was worth, in order to
secure his succession to the office unexpectedly vacated by his
brother-in-law. Once installed, Isaac Bargrave took care to frame
his warnings against popery — no less necessary since the Queen,
Henrietta Maria, had become a focus of Catholic intrigue — in a
more positive fashion than previously. In a sermon preached
before King Charles on 27 March 1627, later published “By His
Maiestie’s Speciall Command,” he declared himself unflinchingly
in favor of the divine right of kings:

Kings are Gods Christs on earth (as the Psalmist calls them).
They are neither from Pope nor people, as some would have it;
but hold in Capite immediately from God. . . . No man hath
learn’d to disobey his King, but he had learn’d before to disobey
his God. Oh, let us all therefore take heed, That while we flye
from Idolatry, we runne not into Rebellion.9°

Yet Dean Bargrave’s forthrightness did not prevent him from
coming under attack from the very quarters where he hoped to
gain favor. In acquiring the Deans office, he had consolidated the
position of his family within the Kentish gentry and was
qualified to be a spokesman of that fiercely traditional and un-
feignedly Royalist group. Sitting by right as a magistrate at the
county court of Maidstone, he held civil as well as ecclesiastical
power.91 When it was a question of a member of Parliament for
Kent, to serve in the Short Parliament of 1640, he was to use his
influence successfully in promoting the cause of his relative Sir
Edward Dering.92 But Bargrave’s local power was limited by the
fiercely intrusive policies of William Laud, Archbishop of Can-
terbury and Primate of All England, who seems to have sought
out the occasions to meddle in the affairs of the Dean who bore
his own territorial marker. In 1627, Isaac Bargrave was assigned
the living of Lydd, on the South Kent coast, by "‘Abbot’s colla-
tion”; another candidate, however, was presented by the King,
and Laud, assisted by the bishops of his persuasion, after several
months quashed “the admission of the said Bargrave.”93

Laud may have had a genuine interest in vindicating the royal
authority on this occasion, however injurious his method. But it
is difficult to defend his action in a further confrontation with
the Dean, when Laud launched an attack on the foreign churches

55


Under the Sign

serving the various non—English communities in towns like Can-
terbury and Sandwich. Laud made no secret of his view that
these churches were “nests and occasions of schism” and ordered
Dean Bargrave and his chapter to enforce the principle that all
foreigners born in England should be obliged to attend only
English churches. Bargrave attempted a conciliatory posture,
when the injunctions were delivered, mildly suggesting to the
foreign ministers that “they might go down into the [deans]
garden and there talk and communicate together.”9‘* But Laud
was not to be dissuaded, and the protestations of Dean and
Chapter, Mayor and Corporation, not to mention the gentry and
justices of the peace, could not delay the execution of his policy.

It is ironic that, in the entry on Isaac Bargrave in the Dictionary
of National Biography, this incident is recounted back to front,
with the Dean pressing for the foreign churches to come into
line, and the archbishop showing his disapproval of the Deans

“high—handed orders.”95 Isaac Bargrave did indeed acquire a repu-
tation for autocratic behavior, while the evidence of a confronta-
tion like this suggests that he was altogether on the side of
reconciliation, especially when the good order and traditional
customs of his county and city were involved. What is beyond
doubt is that Bargrave’s via media —— the Anglicanism deriving
from Lancelot Andrewes, whose ecumenical significance had
been endorsed by Father Paulo — proved an increasingly arduous
route to follow, as the Laudians and the Puritans polarized opin-
ions in the English church.

Throughout the 16305, however, Isaac Bargrave continued his
tenure as Dean, in relative tranquillity. He seems to have retained
the taste for the theater, which he had already shown as a young
fellow at Cambridge, and maybe it was a repeat performance of
Ruggle’s Ignoramus that Henry Oxinden was noting when he
wrote to Katharine Oxinden on 6 February 1637: “There is a
Comedie acted tonight in Lattin at the Deanery.”96 In line with
the ceremonialism and musical analogies of Andrewes, he also
made liturgical innovations in the cathedral itself. The “fayre
organ, sweet and tunable,” which was heard in the cathedral by a
visitor from Norwich in 1635,97 was quite possibly the instru-
ment whose case remains, a mere shell, in the cathedral library. It

56

Rise and Fall of the House of Bargrave

bears, on one side, the arms of the Cathedral Church of Canter-
bury and, on the other, those of Dean Bargrave (fig. 12).

The Bargrave arms also occur in a more prominent, and unex-
pected, location — high in the medieval vault of the ancient Clois-

ter, just above the entrance into the chapel of the Martyrdom of I

Saint Thomas Becket (fig. 13). Once again, Isaac’s unjustified
reputation for autocratic behavior has led to the unproved im-
putation that he was showing the manners of an upstart when he
arranged for the placing of these recently acquired armorial bear-
ings in a setting otherwise confined to medieval heraldry. The
real explanation appears to be a simple one, and it is by no means
discreditable. The probability is that the damage caused by a
falling pinnacle in 1639 was repaired by the Dean, quite possibly
at his own expense, and the new shield, as part of the restoration
work, was a necessary embellishment to the cloister.98 Patrick
Collinson has reminded us that it is only in the revised statutes
of the cathedral, delivered by Charles I in 1637, that the actual
architecture of the building — “fabrica illa pulclterrima” — becomes
a legitimate concern of the Dean and Chapter.99 Isaac Bargrave’s
work of restoration, as indeed his other provisions for the musi-
cal and liturgical life of the foundation, indicate his devotion to
the cathedral both as a place of community and as a consummate
work of architecture and art.

There is no reason to doubt that John Bargrave the Younger,
climbing the academic ladder at Cambridge, would have shared
his uncle's attitudes and deplored the tendency of the Laudian
faction to stir up issues of controversy. Matthew Wren, the old
friend of his uncle and Master of Peterhouse until 1634, was
originally Laudsagent in Cambridge and, as such, helped to
engineer the election of the Duke of Buckingham as Chancellor
of the university in 1627. He also supported Laud’s insistence
that the colleges should have their own chapels and contributed
at his own expense to the building of the prominent chapel,
which still exists; according to Trevor—Roper, “he introduced a
service in Latin, with the correct Laudian ceremonies, but he was
content with a simple building and plain glass windows.” His
successor, however, was not so restrained in his tastes. Although
Wren had tried to arrange for the succession of his brother

57


Under the Sign

Christopher (the father of the architect), the college was obliged
by the Bishop of Ely, acting under Laud’s instructions, to accept
the “most active, the most extreme and the most aggressive of all
the new ‘Arminian’ clergy,” the former Archdeacon of Durham,
john Cosin.1°°
Althoughjohn Bargrave the Younger continued at Peterhouse
under Cosin’s mastership, becoming a fully fledged fellow in
1637, he must have bitterly resented the way in which the college
was made to set the pace in provocative Laudian innovations. He
cannot have wholly approved of the splendid refurbishment of
Wren’s chapel, so successful that, it was alleged, undergraduates
of other colleges flocked there “to learn or practise popery.”1°1
He perhaps looked askance at the arrival from Pembroke of the
poet Richard Crashaw, who wrote Latin verses to solicit funds for
the new decorations. On his first visit to Rome in 1647, he was to
meet “four revolters to the Roman Church that had been fellows
of Peterhouse in Cambridge with myself,” and the number in-
cluded Crashaw (CC 37). If the slide to Rome was already appre-
hensible in the 16305, as the liturgical observance at Peterhouse
became hotter and more hectic, John Bargrave would certainly
have kept his distance.
It is hardly surprising that, in these circumstances, john Bar-
grave should have fallen back on the connections that meant
most to him, his links with the clergy and gentry of the county of
Kent. In the admission book of the college, he is recorded as
having had a whole sequence of Kentish men under his tutelage:
Thomas Bargrave, his cousin and son of Dean Isaac, from 1636;
Anthony Aucher, of the Bishopsbourne family, from the same
year (the one who was originally, and no doubt inappropriately,
allocated to Crashaw!)', Edward Wilsford, who was to take a
leading part with Sir Thomas Peyton in welcoming the return of
Charles II to Dover in 1660102; Edwin Sandys, of Lancashire,
who seems like an exception to the rule but was presumably a
member of the far-flung family of the former Archbishop Sandys,
like Edward Wilsford’s mother; both of these were allotted to
john Bargrave in 1637. The list continues, one of the last being
Johannes Rayment (alias John Raymond), Bargrave's nephew
and the winner of a Foundation Scholarship injanuary 1643; he

58

 

fitiseand FalHfthaHousaofBargraup ?, _ ?, _,

was to be one of BargraVe’s two traveling companions in 1646-47
and the ostensible author of the Mercurio Italico.

If john Bargrave maintained his Kentish clientage, his uncle
Isaac stood out as a defender of the traditions of the University of
Cambridge, when the: Long Parliament began to wreak their
vengeance on Laud and his adherents. At the parliamentary ses-
sion of 12 May 1641, when a bill for abolishing the episcopacy was
debated, the Dean “delivered a letter from the university of Cam-
bridge, and a petition from them, and a petition from the almes-
men and officers and other members of the cathedrall of Canter-
bury, and another petition from the tenants of the same
cathedrall.”1°3 Isaac Bargrave’s sheaf of petitions was unavailing,
and he was also unable to impede the passage of a bill in the same
session that proposed the unilateral abolition of all deans and
chapters throughout the kingdom. In 1642, the pace of events
quickened further. In March, the Kentish gentry marched en
masse to Westminster to present a petition of its own to parlia-
ment, a show of strength on behalf of the King that must have
unsettled the Roundhead majority. The ensuing resignation of
the Lord Lieutenant of Kent, the Earl of Leicester, who was
unable to enforce his orders, in the absence of royal authority,
caused a further crisis. On 16]uly 1642, there took place a “great
meeting” of the leading East Kent gentry in the Chartham dean-
ery of Isaac Bargrave. By this stage, the King had set up his stan-
dard at Oxford, but rumors circulated throughout the summer
that he would march into Kent and join his loyal supporters.1°‘*
Parliament decided on a punitive expedition to stem this incip-
ient revolt, and, in mid—August, Colonel Edwyn Sandys (one of
the rare Puritan sympathizers among the East Kent gentry) raised
troops in London to chastise and frighten his county neighbors.

There exist vivid descriptions, from both sides of the political
spectrum, of the vengeance wreaked by Sandys and his troopers
on the cathedral and close of Canterbury. Doctor Paske, the Sub-
Dean, who published on 9 September 1642 his outraged account
of the incident, tells how they “overthrew the communion table,
toare the velvet cloth from before it, defaced the goodly Skreen

. violated the Monuments of the dead, spoiled the Organs,
brake downe the ancient Railes and Seates . . . forced open the

59


Under the Sign

Cupboards of the Singing Men, rent some of their Surplices,
Gownes and Bibles. . . .”1°5 The Puritan minister Richard
Culmer, who himself had been persecuted by Laud in the 16305,
wrote gloatingly in 1644 of this violent inruption: “They hewed
the Altar rails in pieces and threw the Altar over and over down
the three Altar steps and left it lying with the heels upwards.”
What for Paske is a profanation of the beauty of holiness is for
Culmer a rooting out of the signs of abhorred idolatry. He
delights in recounting the damage down to Dean Bargrave’s mu-
sical embellishments: “the zealous troopers began to play on the
organs or case of whistles which were never in tune since.”1°5

Sandys and his troopers did not spare the deanery. Isaac Bar-
grave being absent, they broke into his house in the middle of
the night and terrified his family The aged Angela Bargrave,
widow of Dean Boys, who still resided there, had a cache of gold
coins rudely confiscated, though this was later returned. The
Dean’s eldest son, Thomas Bargrave, had his sword broken by
Colonel Sandys “before his face” and was sent off as a prisoner to
Dover Castle. The Dean himself, who was hurrying home from
London to comfort his family, was intercepted and arrested by
the indefatigable colonel at an inn in Gravesend, arrested and
taken to the Fleet Prison, where he remained for three weeks
before being released, without having been charged or examined
by the House of Commons. As a contemporary Royalist account
puts it: “The old Dean, heart—broken with these injuries, soon
after dyes. . . .”1°7

john Bargrave the Younger, meditating on this further catas-
trophe to the House of Bargrave, may have conceived of the
symbolic violence done to his family in terms of their armorial
bearings: he may have considered wrily both the “old gold” that
was wrested from his aunt and the “sword (which hung at his
bed’s head)” that was rudely broken before the face of his young
cousin. Having commemorated his father and brother in 1663, in
the Patrixbourne inscription, he was still to project a more splen-
did monument, next to the tomb of Dean Boys, to the memory of
his unfortunate uncle (see fig. II). Retrospectively, however, in
the text of the ruinously expensive memorial put up by his

60

Rise and Fall of the House of Bargrave

nephew, Dean Isaac Bargrave is assimilated to his Bifrons connec-
tions, being attributed an almost identical inscription:

In the Civil War on the side of King Charles the Martyr
He stood and fell.

61


TWO

THE TRAVELER AND
THE COLLECTOR

riography, Fernand Braudel focuses on “the death of Philip
11, 13th September, 1598.” This is the closing section, be-
fore the conclusion, to his monumental work on The Mediterra-
nean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip H, and
Braudeluses it to speculate on the insignificance of the individ-
ual human life in the context of the longue durée. Philip II is
presented to us not as the all—powerful, all-knowing sovereign
who swayed the destiny of the “age” to which he gave his name
but, on the contrary, as an “enigmatic figure,” a compound of
discordant representations of the “self,” to which we as readers
and historians can have but a limited‘ access.
First, there is the religious self. The King dies a “public . . .
social and ceremonious" death. Braudel opines that: “This man
. whom his enemies shamelessly slandered with the most
absurd calumnies . . . can only be understood in relation to a life
of the purest religion.” But then there is the sovereign, “the force
of history symbolized by his name.” This is a very different
proposition from the solitary and exemplary Catholic: “he re-
ceives us as he did his ambassadors, with the utmost courtesy,
listening to us, replying in a low and often unintelligible voice,
never speaking of himself at all.” Braudel communicates to us
the fascination of this (so to speak) negative image of the King
performing his regal duties. But then the positive image forces its
way in again — or, rather, a succession of images, those that trace
the outward physiognomy of the royal body over the course of a
long and eventful life. “And Philip’s life was a long and disturbed
one, from the painting by Titian of the prince in his twentieth
year to the terrible and moving portrait by Pantoja de la Cruz
which shows us the king at the end of his reign, the shadow of
what he once had been.”

I 11 one of the most celebrated passages in all modern histo-

63


    
 
      
 
 
 
 
    
 
  
     
  

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7. Left: Memorial inscription in St. Marys Church,
Patrixbourne (Photo by Bob Chaplin)

8. Above: Map of East Kent, showing towns, villages,
and country houses mentioned in the text
(Drawing by David Dobson, Canterbury
Archaeological Trust)


II. Left: Memorial to Isaac Bargrave, Lady Chapel, Canterbury
Cathedral (By permission of the Dean and Chapter)

12. Above: Organ case with the Bargrave arms on the left—hand
door and the arms of Canterbury Cathedral on the
right-hand door, early seventeenth century
(Canterbury Cathedral Archive)


 

13. Left: Vaulting of the Cloister, by the entry into the
Martyrdom, Canterbury Cathedral, showing the Bargrave
coat of arms (By permission of the Dean and Chapter)

14. Above: Mattio Bolognini, Three~quarter Length Portraits of
the Young Alexander Chapman, john Bargrave, Aged 37, and His Nephew
john Raymond, Aged about 17, painted at Siena in 1647 (Chapman
is probably on Bargrave’s right and Raymond on his left).
Oil on copper, W. 13.5 cm., Bargrave collection
(Canterbury Cathedral Archive)


INDEX

Adorno, Theodor, 76-77
Alexander Vll, pope, 118,120, 122,
fig. 26
Anatomy, 15
theater at Padua, 93
Andrewes, Lancelot (bishop of
Winchester), 51-52, 56,112
Antiquities, 74-75, 85, 100-101
Arundel, Earl of, 6-7, 80, 85

Bacon, Francis, 2

Bargar, Robert (grandfather of J. B.), 8

28
Bargrave family, 23, 25-61
coat of arms granted to, 12, 34, 45,
60,137, figs 2, 7,12,13,14
etymology of surname, 32,135
Bargrave, Angela, 31, 60
Bargrave, Isaac (dean of Canter-
bury). 3. 16, 52-57, 82. 97.
100-111, 139, fig. 11
Bargrave,Jane. See Crouch,Jane.
Bargrave,John (father of J. B.), 26,
29131-45123
Bargrave,J0hn
birth and parentage, 28-32, 33-
34
Cabinet of Curiosities, 3-5, 82-
83, figs 6, 22
childhood, 45-46
as collector, 5-7, 74-76
drawing of Queen Christina, 115-
16
education, 46, 50-54, 57-59
portraits of, 6-8, 65-67, 113-14,
figs 2, 14

religious and political beliefs, 18-
20, 54, 57-61, 104-24
scientific interests, 13-17, 73, 100,
103
as traveler, 1, 65-74, 78
as witness of historical events,
57-61,1o4—3o
Bargrave,John (nephew of J. B.),
25-26, 125
Bargrave, Richard (uncle of J. B.),
30, 115: 147 .
Bargrave, Robert (brother of J. B.),
33, 47-48, 66, 83, 86,105,125,
136
Bargrave, Robert (cousin of J. B.),
66, 83, 141
Bargrave, Thomas (cousin of J. B.),
83, I39
Becket, Saint Thomas, 14, 57, 94-
95: 97
Bendysh, Sir Thomas, 66
Benjamin, Walter, 76-77
Berkenhead, SirJohn, 108
Bifrons (childhood home of J. B.),
25, 27, 99,101,136, fig. 1o
poetic usage of name, 36-37
Biography, 8, 77-78
Blagrave,John, 32, 73,135
Bolognini, Mattio, 66,141, fig. 14
Boys,J0hn (dean of Canterbury),
30-31, 46, 84, 126, fig. 9
Boys, Sirjohn, 30, 126
Braudel, Femand, 63, 91
Bredekamp, Horst, 9
Buckingham, Duke of, 54

149


Notes to Pages 28-30

8. Archaeologia Cantiana (1887), 17:150.

9. Joseph Meadows Copwer, Canterbury Marriage Licences, 1568-
1618 (Canterbury, 1892).

10. Arthur]. Willis, ed., Canterbury Licences (General), 1568—1646
(London and Chichester: Phillimore, n.d.), 125.

11. Arthur]. Willis, ed., Church Life in Kent . . . 1559-1565 (Lon-
don and Chichester: Phillimore, n.d.), 52.

12. Cowper, Canterbury Marriage Licences.

13. For the possible origins, and connotations of the name Bar-
grave, see p. 32. I am not, of course, implying that euphony was the
sole, or the dominant, consideration in this process of standardiza-
tion.

14. Quoted in Peter Laslett, “The Gentry of Kent in 1640,” Cam-
bridge Historical journal 9 (1948): 154.

15. See Alan Everitt, “The Community of Kent in 1640,” The
Genealogists’ Magazine 14, no. 8 (December 1963): 233.

16. Edward I-lasted, History of Kent (Wakefield: E.P. Publishing,
1972), 3:711. The Gilberts were a prominent Sandwich family, and
John Gilbert held civic office in the town. In the chancel of the now
disused church of St. Peters, there is a brass recording the death in
1597 of a son of John, Thomas Gilbert, “who was Searcher of Kent”
(transcribed in W.D. Belcher, Kentish Brasses [London, 1988] 1: 101).
The office of Searcher involved inspection of leather goods to verify
their quality, and it is surely not irrelevant that the brother-in-law of
Robert Bargrave the Tanner had achieved this responsible office. (I
am indebted to Andrew Butcher for this information.)

17. Dorothy Gardiner, The Oxinden Letters, 16o7—1642 (London:
Constable, 1933), xxiv.

18. He was to take an active part in the Kentish Rebellion of 1647-
48, alongside his nephew Robert Bargrave of Bifrons. See Alan Ever-
itt, The Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion, 1640-1660
(Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1966), 250, in which his role
in encouraging the navy to mutiny against the Parliament is men-
tioned; see also p. 125, for his survival after the Commonwealth
period.

19. See Alumni Cantabrigienses (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1922), for entries on john and Isaac.

20. See john Newman, West Kent and the Weald (1969; reprint,
Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1987), entry on Sevington.

134

Notes to Pages 31-33

21. The entry recording their marriage in the Patrixbourne Regis-
ter is reprinted in the published version of Philipott’s Visitation of the
County of Kent; see Archaeologia Cantiana (1861), 4:252.

22. See). R. Wardale, Clare College (London, 1899), 57.

23. Sir Henry Wotton was himself born at Boughton Malherbe, a
short distance from Surrenden Dering, the seat of the Dering family

24. Laslett, “The Gentry of Kent,” 152.

25. See Chas. A. Bernau, Sixteenth Century Marriages (London:
1911), 15 (ref. to St. Mary Woolchurch Parish Register).

26. J. L. Chester, Allegations for Marriage Licences issued by the
Bishop of London, 1520 to 1610 (London: Harleian Society, 1887), 25:
258; see also William Berry, County Genealogies of Berkshire (London,
1837).

27. I am indebted for this information to Hubert Chesshyre, York
Herald. He has also communicated to me an extract from Herald and
Genealogist (1865), in which it is asserted that Bargrave was the
name “of a hamlet in Patricksbourne parish” to which the family no
doubt ascribed their origin (2: 429). Although I have found no other

_eVidence of such a hamlet, this is an attractive possibility, which
might explain the family’s attachment to Patrixbourne before the
building of Bifrons. “Bargrove,” derived from the Old English for
“barley grove,” was certainly a medieval place name, found in East
Kent, for example, at Newington, between Folkestone and Hythe.
See J. K. Wallenberg, The Place Names of Kent (Uppsala, 1934), 453.

28. See the previous note. As this pedigree was transcribed by
Hasted, it is difficult to rely on such exact choices of phrasing, but
this does at least seem to indicate some tenurial connection, before
the building of Bifrons.

29. See The Art of Dyalling in Two Parts by john Blagrave of
Reading, Gentleman, and Mathematician this year 1609 (published)
at London. An impressive memorial to Blagrave is to be found in St.
Lawrence’s Church, Reading. The sister ofjane Bargrave (née Crouch)
was herself the sister-in-law of the mathematician.

30. Susan Kingsbury, ed., The Records of the Virginia Company of
London (Washington, 1935), 4:435. The document exists in a num-
ber of manuscript copies, of which the text given here (in Sir
Nathaniel Rich’s hand) is in the Public Record Office. The version in
the British Library (Add. M5. 12, 496 ff. 454—55) omits this preface.

135


Under the Sign

Here the armor is preserved. Here the spoils are kept under
observation as mementos. Here the stripped skin is kept safe for
future use. In the proliferation of connoted meanings, Bargrave’s
life as a collector, traveler, and witness is placed under a final
sanction and subsumed in a final release, barring the grave.

130

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. john Evelyn, Diary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955),
3:614.

2. For Bargrave’s lodgings in the precincts, see Margaret Sparks,
“The Monastic Infirmary and Choir House,” Canterbury Cathedral
Chronicle, 1991, 29. The building, now substantially altered by an

_ eighteenth-century facade, is currently occupied by Linacre, a board-

inghouse of the Kings School.

3. For further discussion of this book, the Itinerary . . . through
Italy, or Mercurio Italico, see pp. 21-22, 77-78.

4. See Peter Vergo, ed., The New Museology (London: Reaktion
Books, 1989).

5. See Elisabeth Landolt and Felix Ackerman, Das Amerbach-Kabi-
nett: Die Objehte im Historischen Museum Basel (Basel: Historisches
Museum Basel, 1991).

6. Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor, eds., The Origins of Mu-
seums (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 153.

7. The words referring to his “gentle” status and his office as
canon appear to have been added in a later hand, which presumably
indicates that Bargrave inscribedhis name on purchasing the sheets,
and amplified it when he had them bound up in a volume, around
1662. The manuscript discussed here is classed E 3921, Literary
Manuscripts, in Canterbury Cathedral Chapter Library. For conven-
ience, references in the text are to the published version (see bibli-
ographical note).

8. See Stephen Bann, The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Represen-
tation of History in Nineteenth-century Britain and France (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 77-92.

9. See Stephen Bann, The Inventions of History: Essays on the
Representation of the Past (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1990), 100-147.

131


Notes to Pages 33-37

31. Philip H. Blake gives the date as 1598 for the baptism of Johns
“eldest son” at Bridge (Archaeologia Cantiana [199o], 1082270). Phil-
ipott’s Visitation, however, refers to Robert Bargrave as “Aet. 19” in
1619. The discrepancy may be explained by the possibility that the

couple had a first child who did not survive.

32. See Norman Council, “Benjonson, Inigo Jones and the Trans-
formation of Tudor Chivalry,” ELH 47, no. 2 (1980): 260.

33. Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1975), 66-70.

34. Archaeologia Cantiana (1861), 4:252.

35. It seems probable that the original structure did not survive
the eighteenth century. According to one author writing at the be-
ginning of the nineteenth century, Bifrons was “taken down about
thirty years ago, by the Rev. E. Taylor, who erected the present
mansion, a respectable brick structure, nearly on the same site”
(Edward Wedlake Brayley, The Beauties of England and Wales [Lon-
don, 1808], 8:1o97).

36. It was at one stage attributed to the Dutch painter Jan Sibe-
rechts, which would have implied a date in the late seventeenth
century; the English painter john Wootton, whose earliest known
works date from around 1718, has also been suggested. The details of
costume indicate, however, that it is too early for Wootton, and the
style appears to be quite different from that of Siberechts. Malcolm
Cormack, of the Yale Center for British Art, who has kindly given me
his opinion, feels that “it may turn out to be by someone like Adriaen
van Dienst (1655-1704) who worked nearby in Kent” (letter of 30
March 1990).

37. This is the View of john Newman, who has studied the paint-
ing in relation to the history of the house. He holds that the interpre-
tation of f‘Bifrons” as meaning an H-plan, with projecting bays on
either side of the main entrance, is unlikely, as such a form was too
common to inspire any such name. The front, with the UXOR BONA
inscription, would therefore be the one facing away from us in the
picture (letter of 21 May 1991).

38. Thomas Carew, poem dated Ijanuary 1630 (1), originally pub-
lished in Poems (1640). See Rhodes Dunlop, Thomas Carew: Poems
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949), 89-90.

39. Sir Henry St. George, The Visitation of London, Anno Domini
1633, 1634 and 1635 (London, 1880), 207.

136

Notes to Pages 37-41

40. Halsted, History of Kent (1800; reprint, Wakefield: EP Pub-
lishing, 1972), 9: 281. For evidence of Hasted’s interest in the motto,
see British Library, Add. M5. 5507, f. 23. The Kentish antiquarian
has inserted in capital letters, in a copy of Philipott’s Visitation of
Kent, the words UXOR BONA.

41. Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (Ox-
ford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 458.

42. I am grateful to Hubert Chesshyre, York Herald, for clarifying
this matter. The Bargrave arms are impaled with the arms of Boys on
the splendid monument that Angela (john the Elders sister) put up
to her husband,}ohn Boys, in the Lady Chapel of the Cathedral (see
fig. 9). They are also borne by John Boys’s successor as dean, his
brother-in-law, Isaac Bargrave (see figs. 11-13). In a Bargrave pedigree
in the British Library, which was copied by Hasted, the armigerous
status of the family is pushed back two generations, with both
Robert Bargrave of Bridge and his father, John, being given arms.
This pedigree derived from one in the possession of the Bargraves of
Eastry, descendants of Isaac, who appear to have been trying to

_ authenticate their own right to the arms that were granted to Isaac’s

elder brother (see British Library, Add, M5. 5520, ff. 40-43).

43. Laslett, “The Gentry of Kent,” 160.

44. He is described as “Theologia Ministerius” in the Philipott
pedigree (1619); this is the brother who made over the living of
Eythorne to his nephew Isaac in 1614 and held Sevington till his
death in 1621. Evidently, the Boys family, in presenting their absentee
cousin to these livings, were supporting the work of the Anglican
church in Virginia.

45. "See Susan Kingsbury, ed., Virginia Company, 1:129.

46. Ibid., 1:347.

47. See I’. A. Bruce, History of Virginia (Chicago and New York,
1924), 1:117ff. l

48. Kingsbury, Virginia Company, 1:154.

49. Ibid., 1:219, 231.

50. Acts of the Privy Council (London, 1932), 1621-23, 396 (10
January 1622[3]).

51. Ibid., 407-8.

52. Ibid., 451 (25 March 1623).

53. Ibid., 255.

137


Notes to Pages 41-48

54. See C. W. Chalklin, Seventeenth-Century Kent (London: Long-
mans, 1965), 197. As this calculation dates from “the middle of the
century,” it is possible that it takes account of some sale of lands as a
result of John Bargrave’s financial difficulties. '

55. Acts of the Privy Council, 1629-30 (1960), 331.

56. Charles M. Andrews, The Colonial Period of American History
(New Haven, 1935), 1:176.

57. Richard Beale Davis, George Sandys: Poet, Adventurer (Lon-
don: Bodley Head, 1955), 109.

58. Kingsbury, Virginia Company, 4:436.

59. Ibid., 4:435. 439. 416-

60. Ibid., 4:424.

6 . Ibid., 4:430, 419.

62. Ibid., 4:423.

63. Ibid., 4:560. Introduction by Arthur Percival Newton.

64. As previously noted, the text of Bargrave’s proposal, which is
used here, is in the hand of Sir Nathaniel Rich. For further material
on the position of Rich and his kinsman, the Earl of Warwick, in the
conflict within the Virginia Company at this stage, see the entry on
Robert Rich, Earl of Warwick, in Dictionary of National Biography.

65. Kingsbury, Virginia Company, 4:422.

66. Laslett, “The Gentry of Kent,” 150.

67. Ibid., 163.

68. See Johann P. Sommerville, ed., Sir Robert Filmer: Patriarcha
and other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991),
xxxii—xxxiv.

69. C. E. Woodruff, “A Seventeenth-Century Survey of the E5-
tates of the Dean and Chapter of Canterbury in East Kent,” Archae-
ologia Cantiana, 38:39.

70. Acts of the Privy Council (1938), January—August 1627, 457.

71. So, at least, we may conclude from the letter of her mother,
Mary Peyton, to her sister, Anne Oxinden, which describes how Sir
Thomas (the brother of the two heiresses) “would not beleeve" the
portion allotted to her, but acquiesced when shown the will. There
seems to be no reason why the other sister should not also have been
generously dowered (Gardiner, Oxinden Letters, 1607-1642, 87).

72. British Library, Add. Ms. 27,999, f. 290.

73. Gardiner, Oxinden Letters, 1607-1642, 112-13.

-

138

Notes to Pages 48-54

74. Ibid., 220-23.

75. Matthew Carter, A Most True and Exact Relation of That as
Honourable as Unfortunate Expedition of Kent, Essex, and Colchester
(1650), 66.

76. See C. Elton, TheVTenures of Kent (London:James Parker, 1867)
354. For the general position of younger sons at this time, see Joan
Thirsk, “Younger Sons in the Seventeenth Century," History 54 (1969):
358-77-

77. Dean Isaac Bargrave arranged for his own son, Thomas, to
study in Hollapd, during his period at the Kings School. I am indebted
to Paul Pollafk, archivist at the King's School, for this information.

78. Bargrave was elected North scholar on 8June 1631, received
his B.A. degree in 1632, and became Perne Scholar on 28 February
1634, shortly before taking over as college librarian, in which post he
served from 7 March 1634 to 23 June 1636. He received his M.A.
degree in 1636 and became fellow, by dispensation, in 1637.

79. See the remarkable essay by Hugh Trevor-Roper, “Laudianism
and Political Power,” in his collection Catholics Anglicans and Pu-
ritans (London: Secker, 1987), 40-119.

80. T. S..Eliot, For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order
(1928; reprint, London: Faber, 1970), 12.

81. Everitt, Kent and the Great Rebellion, 50.

82. H. C. Porter, Reformation and Reaction in Tudor Cambridge
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), 395-96.

83. Trevor-Rober, “Laudianism,” 47.

84. Alumni Cantabrigienses, 84.

85. For Bedell’s experience in Venice, see A True Relation of the
Life and Death of . . . William Bedell, ed. Thomas Wharton Jones
(London: Camden Society, 1872), 1o4ff.

86. Cambridge University Library, Add. 103/5.

87. British Library, Lansdowne, DCCCCLXXXV, 9: “Memoir of Dr.
Isaac Bargrave Dean of Canterbury who died in 1642.”

88. Ibid.

89. For Sir Edward Dering’s marriages and political maneuvers,
see Proceedings principally in the County of Kent, ed. Rev. Lambert B.
Larking (London: Camden Society, 1862), ix. When he was con-
templating a third marriage, ten years later, Dean Bargrave was en-
listed to press his suit with a city clergyman who had influence with
the wealthy widow in question (xxx).

5

139


Notes to Pages 55-63

90. Isaac Bargrave, A Sermon Preached before King Charles, 27
March 1627, 18 and 20. '

91. This close conjunction between civil and ecclesiastical power
was an unusual feature of Kent before the Civil War. It has been
pointed out that all but one of the deans of Canterbury up to this
time “had been drawn from or had founded Kentish families,” and
the untypically low number of livings in lay control helped to create

“a society deeply permeated by anglicanism” (Everitt, Community of
Kent, 49).

92. Ibid., 72.

93. British Library, Add. Ms. 6096, f. 1232a. I am indebted to Peter
Yorke for this information.

94. Quoted in Everitt, Community of Kent, 58.

95. Quoted in ibid.

96. British Library, Add. Ms. 27,999, f. 282.

97. Quoted by W. D. Caroe, Archaeologia 62 (1911): 365.

98. See R. Griffin, The Heraldry in the Cloisters of the Cathedral
Church of Christ at Canterbury (Oxford, 1915), 453.

99. I am grateful to be able to reproduce this quotation from
Patrick Collinson‘s as yet unpublished essay on the cathedral in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

100. Trevor-Roper, “Laudianism,” 80, 83, 71.

101. Ibid., 84.

102. Everitt, Community of Kent, 315.

103. J. Bruce, ed., Verney Papers: Notes of Proceedings of the Long
Parliament Temp. Charles I (London: Camden Society, 1845), 76.

104. Everitt, Community of Kent, 109-10.

105. The Copy of a letter sent . . . by Doctor Pashe (London, 9
September 1642), 4.

106. Richard Culmer, Cathedral Newes from Canterbury (1644),
quoted in Caroe, Archaeologia 62 (1911): 359, 365.

107. Quoted in Abell, Kent and the Great Civil War, 84-85.

CHAPTER 2
1. Femand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean
World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Sian Reynolds (London: Fontana,
1982), 221234-37.
2. Ibid., 221236.

140

Notes to Pages 66-68

3. There are two seventeenth-century Bologninis mentioned in
the Dictionario Enciclopedico dei Pittori e degli Incisori Italiani (Turin:
Bolaffi, 1972), 22181. No work by Mattio (or Matteo) Bolognini exists
in a Sienese public collection.

4. Fabio Chigi was elected to the papacy as Alexander VII, in
1655, while Bargrave was at Rome for his fourth visit.

5. Robert Bargrave’s musical accomplishments are a further in-
dication of the civilized life of the deanery in Isaac Bargrave’s time.
We learn from his journal that he performed on the Viol for the
private singers and instrumentalists of the Medici prince.John Stoye
has called him “the most important of all these travellers, for com-
ments on the Italian music of his day.” See Stoye, English travellers
abroad 1604-1667: Their influence in English Society and Politics (Lon-
don: Cape, 1952), 219-20.

6. One “Franciscus Chapman, Cantianus” is recorded as entering
Peterhouse in 1627, which would make him just the right age for
Bargraves second fellow traveler. The name Alexander may have
been given in error by Craigie Robertson (cc xi), since his father, or

, uncle, was Alexander Chapman, a canon of Canterbury who died in
1629. In his survey of the estates, dating from 1675, Bargrave records
visiting “Mr. Alexander Chapman, grand nephew to Dr. Chapman,”
at Boughton rectory. But the very fact that he makes no mention of a

“fellow traveller” in this chatty document implies that this was yet a
further relation of the canon. See Woodruff, “A Seventeenth-
Century Survey,” 34.

7. See introduction to David Sturdy and Martin Henig, The Gentle
Traveller: john Bargrave, Canon of Canterbury and His Collection
(Canterbury Cathedral Library, 1985), unpaginated.

8. In particular, Bargrave acquired a superb octagonal marble
table, decorated with scenes from the Metamorphoses of Ovid. Lord
Stanhope acquired a matching one at the same time, and a future
Dean of Canterbury, who came from the Stanhope family, reunited
the pair by leaving his own table to the Dean and Chapter in 1748.

The existence of these tables is directly responsible for the re-
newal of interest in Bargrave in the 19805, since Christopher Gibbs
was called in to advise on the repair of one of them and spread the
word about the collection and catalogue. For this story, see the first
contemporary article on Bargrave: John Harris, “To Oblivion and

141


Notes to Pages 68-79

Back: Dr. Bargrave’s Museum of Rarities,” Country Life, 30 January
1986, 278-79.

9. See Earl of Chesterfield, Letters (London, 1835), 9. Bargrave
does in fact write of Chesterfield as being “under my tuition, 1650” (
CC 16), but the young man’s character seems to have been, in any
case, resistant to learning. He appears to have escaped from Bar-
grave’s custody in Milan, “from whence [in his own words] riding
post, with only one servant, through Germany, I was robbed, and in
very great danger of being kil’d” (quoted in ibid., 11).

10. See Stoye, English Travellers, 230. Williamjuxon the younger ’
was the nephew and heir of the future Archbishop of Canterbury,
whose patronage in 1662 was to help Bargrave to his prebendal stall.

He became a baronet at the time of the Restoration.

11. Chaney, The Grand Tour, 49.

12. Stoye, English Travellers, 176.

13. See Albrecht Von Haller, The Alps, trans. Stanley Mason
(Zurich: De Clivo Press, 1987), for this new taste.

14. See Charles Dickens, American Notes . . . and Pictures from
Italy (London: Mandarin, 1991), 450, for this description, which 1
Raymond seems to endorse. He writes, “In returning, as we were
tir’d in getting up, so wee went easily down, though almost up to the
knees in ashes” (M1 162-63).

15. Louis Marin, “The Frontiers of Utopia,” in Utopias and the
Millennium, ed. Krishan Kumar and Stephen Bann (London: Reak-
tion Books, 1993), 14.

16. Hobbes is, of course, responsible for the well-known formula-
tion that “the angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection,”
applying this principle to sounds, material bodies, etc. For this quo-
tation, dated 1656, and for other useful data on “tours,” or “towers,”
see O.E.D.

17. See The Gentle Traveller, Italy: Books, Manuscripts, Prints and
Paintings, item j.

18. Braudel, Mediterranean, 221236-37.

19. See review by Peter Burke of The Inventions of History, in
History of Human Sciences 4, no. 3:435—37.

20. Theodor Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber
(London: Spearman, 1967), 239-40. a

21. See All England Law Reports (1964), 891ff.

142

Notes to Pages 79-91

22. See j. R Earwaker, East Cheshire: Past and Present (London:
1880), 2:43.

23. All England Law Reports (1964), 894.

24. See David Howarth, Lord Arundel and His Circle (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1985), 191 and passim.

25. Sigmund Freud,_Art and Literature (Harmondsworth: Pen-
guin, 1985), 289.

26. Ibid., 290.

27. Everitt, Kent and the Great Rebellion, 250.

28. Abell, Kent and the Great Civil War; 252.

29. See The Gentle Traveller: The Cabinets.

30. See]. C. T. Oates, Cambridge University Library:AHistory (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 302-3.

31. Raymond actually refers to it as a pyramid, but this must be an
error. For a fascinating discussion about how the Earl of Arundel
might have intended to use the obelisk — _which was later erected,
minus the pieces chipped off by Bargrave, in the Piazza Navona — see
Howarth, Lord Arundel, 111-12.

32. It is likely that this was a delicate compliment to Bargrave,
though with a self-congratulatory aspect to it. Aristotle was cele-
brated in antiquity as having been the tutor to Alexander the Great.

33. Henry Peacham, The Compleat Gentleman; reprinted as The
Complete Gentleman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962).

34. Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities, 12.

35. Michael Vickers, of the Department of Antiquities, Ash-
molean Museum, writes that he is “reasonably sure that a . . . lamp
listed in our 1836 catalogue as ‘A circular lamp’ is the one in ques-
tion” (letter to the author, 21 June 1991). See Catalogue of the Ash-
molean Museum (Oxford, 1836), 126, item 143.

36. Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Cul-
ture and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1991), 30-31.

37. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the
Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity Press, 1984), 134.

38. Braudel, Mediterranean, 211236.

39. See CC xvii. Dargate is about four miles northwest of Canter-
bury, near the North Kent coast. Perhaps Mrs. Bargrave’s former

143


Notes to Pages 93~1o2

husband was one of the “parochial organizers of the 1648 rebellion,"
John Osborne, who had earlier been fined by Parliament. See Ever-
in, Kent and the Great Rebellion, 184, 245.

40. The Gentle Traveller: The Cabinets. 5

41. See, for example, the postface by Michel Conan to his edition
of the seventeenth-century garden book by Salomon de Caus, Le
Jardin palatin (Paris: Editions -du Moniteur, 1981).

42. Desiderius Erasmus, Pilgrimages of Saint Mary Walsingham
and Saint Thomas of Canterbury (London, 1875), 49.

43. Landolt and Ackermann, Das Amerbach-Kabinett, 37-49.

44. Richard Culmer, Cathedral Newes from Canterbury . . . (Lon-
don, 1644), 7.

45. See Blaise de Montesquiou-Fézensac, Le Trésor de Saint-Denis:
inventaire de 1634 (1973; reprint, Paris: Editions A. and J. Picard,
I974).

46. See Ronald Paulson, Breaking and Remaking: Aesthetic Prac-
tice in England, 1700-1820 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University
Press, 1989), esp. 4-47, 203-45.

47. John Boys, manuscript poem in Canterbury Cathedral Li-
brary: Literary Manuscripts E32, f. 51.

CHAPTER 3

1. Archaeologia Cantiana 6 (1866): 331.

2. Ibid., 330.

3. See Gordon J. Copley, ed., Camdens Britannia: Kent (London:
Hutchinson, 1977), 59.

4. See Philippa Levine, The Amateur and the Professional: Anti-
quarians, Historians and Archaeologists in Victorian England (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

5. For a description of the Faussett Pavilion, see R. Ejessup, “The
Faussett Pavilion,” Archaeologia Cantiana 66 (1953): 1-14. See also
the discussion in Bann, The Inventions of History, 100-21.

6. Jessup, “The Faussett Pavilion,'_’ 6. The stone inscription from
the pavilion, and several of the objects originally incorporated in it,
are in the collections of the Canterbury City Museums.

7. Ibid., 2. The incident is mentioned in Faussett’s own Inven-
torium Sepulchrale, entry for 27 July 1772.

8. Ibid., 8.

144

Notes to Pages 104-15

9. From “Concerning Geffray Teste Noire,” originally published
in The Defence of Guinevere (1858). See William Morris, Prose and
Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1913), 257-58.

10. See Dorothy Gardiner, Oxinden and Peyton Letters, 18H.

11. Ibid., 23-24. Letter of Sir Thomas Peyton to the Earl of Elgin,
then staying at Knowlton (1643).

12. Everitt, The Community of Kent, 280.

13. Gardiner, Oxinden and Peyton Letters, 212-13.

14. It was described as “written by a Gentleman who was an eye-
witness where this was really acted upon that bloody stage, the
streets of Naples, 1647”; this evocative description was used on the
title page.

I am greatly indebted for this reference, and for all the informa-
tion about the representation of Masaniello’s revolt that is given
here, to Wendy Roworth, who kindly showed me the draft of her
paper “The Evolution of History Painting: Masaniello’s Revolt and
Other Disasters in Seventeenth-Century Naples."

15. The painting is in the Galeria Spada, Rome.

16. Translated and quoted by Roworth in “The Evolution of His-
tory Painting."

17. Perhaps Raymond was fortunate in his timing. From 1647
Parliament “increasingly tightened its hold on the press.” See John
Feather, A History of British Publishing (London: Routledge, 1988),
49-

18. See George Ruggle, Ignoramus, ed.J. Hawkins (London, 1787),

' xxiv.

19. Isaac Bargrave, A Sermon against Selfe Policy, Preached at
Whitehall in Lent 1621 (London, 1624), 18.

2o. Eliot, For Lancelot Andrewes, 14.

21. Quoted in Andrew Ross, The Failure of Modernism (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1986), 36.

22. Life and Death of William Bedell, 109.

23. The portraits of Wotton and Donne are reproduced in John
Donne, ed. Jean-Marie Benoist (Paris: I_’Age d’Homme, 1983).

24. See Georges Didi-Huberman, “Le Grammaire, le chahut, le
silence: pour une anthropologie du visage,” in A Visage découvert
(Paris: Flammarion, 1992), 15-16. This publication relates to an ex-
hibition held at the Foundation Cartier, Jouy-en-Josas.

145


Notes to Pages 115-20

25. Paul Pollack has drawn my attention to the fact that the
earlier, triple portrait of Bargrave and his fellow travelers, painted at
Siena in 1647, resembles in its figure composition the famous study
by Van Dyck, Charles I Seen in Three Positions (1635-36). In particu-
lar, the right-hand figure of Charles has his cloak drawn back by the
right hand in a similar way to john Raymond, on the left-hand side
of Bargrave. As the triple portrait of Charles I was sent to Bernini in
Rome, it is possible that it would have been a common point of
reference for an Italian artist and a group of English gentlemen.

There still exists, in the North Choir Aisle of Canterbury Cathe-
dral, a large portrait of Charles I as King and Martyr, which dates
from the Restoration period. He is depicted with his left hand on his
heart as in the frontispiece to Eikon Basilihe (1649).

26. See Georgina Masson, Queen Christina (London: Secker,
I968), 239. This seems, on the face of it, inconsistent with Bargrave’s
statement that the ceremony “was done with great solemnity, at
which I was present, staying there a month for that purpose” (cc
69). But Bargrave may have overemphasized, in retrospect, the ele-
ment of conscious planning in his decision to pass by way of Inns-
bruck on his way back from Italy. Or he might have been better
informed, through his Roman sources, than Queen Christina’s hosts.

27. Ibid., 248, 288 (page facing). A precious indication of the
origin of Bargrave’s skill in portraiture and printmaking is provided
by the manuscript discourses of another English traveler in Italy,
Richard Symonds. Mary Beal has kindly brought to my attention a
passage in which Symonds records a method “to take off Intaglios”
(i.e., etchings) and writes “Mr Raymond learnt of Mr Bargrave to add
Black Lead. They learnt in Germany” (see British Library, MS. Eger-
ton 1636, f. 150).

28. Ibid., 119.

29. Caroline M. Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 172.

30. Ibid., 242.

31. I-lamon L’Estrange, Reign of Charles I (1655), quoted in ibid.,
245.

32. Canterbury Cathedral Library, Literary Manuscripts, E. 39a,
f. 4.

33. See Gregorio Leti, Il Nipotismo di Roma (Amsterdam, 1667), 1:
176.

146

Notes to Pages 124-29

34. Evidently, Bargrave had ordered the monument in the last
year of his life but had not paid for it; this seems the most likely
explanation of the phrase “Posterum Expensis" (at the expense of
his posterity), which appears there. The ill feeling that resulted from
this untimely commission can be detected in the will of Mrs. Bar-
grave, dated 26 July 1685, where mention is made of her payment of
upwards of four hundred pounds in debts and funeral expenses.
Instead of desiring to share his grave, she asked to be buried in the
Nave of the cathedral, near her father (cc xx).

35. William Gostling, A Walk about the City of Canterbury (1777;
reprint, Canterbury, 1825), 229.

36. See A Visitation of the County of Kent, Harleian Society, 54:79.
Reference to the land leased by Richard Bargrave in Bridge can be
found in the account books of the parish, a copy of which was kindly
communicated to me by Maurice Raraty.

37. They are described as “lessees of this estate for many years
past,” in Hasted, History of Kent, 10:105.

38. Archaeologia Cantiana IO (1876):95.

39. British Library, Lansdowne, DCCCCLXXXV, 9; the brief note is
annexed to a longer passage on Isaac Bargrave, which has already
been quoted (see pp. 53-54).

40. Gardiner, Oxinden and Peyton Letters, 275.

41. Archaeologia Cantiana 10 (1876): 97.

42. Calendar of Treasury Books, 1660-1667 (London: Public Rec-

ord Office, 1914), 430.

43. This is the version of the inscription given in Joseph
Meadows Cowper, The Memorial Inscriptions of the Cathedral Church
at Canterbury (Canterbury, 1897), cxvi. It differs very slightly from
the version given in the manuscript source mentioned in the pre-
vious note and appears to be a more exact transliteration. Cowper
lists the arms appearing on the slab as: “Effaced. Impaling, a chevron
[remainder effaced] .” From this, it would appear that Mrs. Bargrave’s
arms were “impaled” with those of Bargrave and that she was origi-
nally intended to share his tomb.

147


Index

Cabinets of Curiosities, 4-5, 88
Amerbach Cabinet, 4, 85, 95
The Ark, Lambeth, 5
Cabinet of Dr. Casaubon, 84
Wunderkammern, 9, 13
See also curiosity; Evelyn,John

Calvinism, 51

Cambridge, University of, 50-52
See also Pembroke College;

Peterhouse

Camden, Thomas, 36

Canterbury, 1, 25
cathedral of, 25, 49, 124-26
Kings School, 50, 139

Carevv, Thomas, 36

Carter, Matthew, 48

Casaubon, Dr. Meric, 84

Cerquozzi, Michelangelo, 107

Chapman, Alexander, 66, 141, fig. 14

Chafles 1 (king of England), 36, 57,

117-18, 120-21, 146
See also kingship

Charles II (king of England), 20, 26,

108,11o,118,128

Chesterfield, Countess of, 67

Chesterfield‘, Earl of (Lord

Stanhope), 67, 86, 141-42

Chigi, Cardinal, 66
See also Alexander VII, pope

Christina, Queen (of Sweden), 115-

16,146, fig. 25

Collection, definition of, 78-81

Cosin,John,58, 117

Crashaw, Richard, 19, 58, 133

Cromwell, Oliver, 12, 119

Crouch, Giles, 31

Crouch,Jane (Bargrave, mother of

J. B.), 31. 35, 37-38
Culmer, Richard, 60, 95
Cultural poetics, 2o
Curiosity, 13, 64, 75, 96,103
See also Cabinets of Curiosities

Dering, Sir Edward, 55,139

Dering, Elizabeth, 31
Didi—Huberman, Georges, 115
Donne,John, 114

Dordt, Synod of, 51

Eliot, T. 5., 51, 112

Erasmus, 95

Essex, Earl of, 38

Evelyn,John, 1-2, 7, 91-92
Cabinet of Curiosities, 2, 4

Faussett, Bryan, 8, 101-3
Filmer, Sir Robert, 44-45
Florence
Cappella dei Principi, 70, 80
Grand Duke's Gallery, 11-12
Freud, Sigmund, 28, 65, 81-82

Gardner, Dorothy, 29
Grand Tour, 68-69
Greenblatt, Stephen, 20, 22

Hamilton, eighth duke of, 68, fig. 15
Hammond, Anthony, 48

Henry VIII (king of England), 94, 97
Historical—mindedness, 104

Hobbes, Thomas, 2,142

Holstenius, Lucas, 116

Hooker, Richard, 51, 112

Howarth, David, 80

Innsbruck, 115-16

James 1 (king of England and Scot-
land), 31

John, Saint, the Divine, 24,123

Johnson, Cornelius, 16-17, 93

Juxon, William (archbishop of Can-
terbury), 68, 84, 142

Kingship,19, 55, 132-33

Laslett, Peter, 31, 40, 44

150

Index

Laud, William (archbishop of Can-
terbury), 55, 117,121

l_’Estrange, Hamon, 118

Leti, Gregorio, 119-20, 123

Loreto, 96 ~

MacGregor, Arthur, 4-5
Marin, Louis, 72, 78

Matthioli, Pietro Andrea, 83
Mazarin, Cardinal, 121-22
Medici, Cardinal de’, 119, fig. 27
Momus, 110

Montias,J. M., 18, 23

Morris, William, 103-4
Museology, 3-4

Naples, 106, 145

See also Vesuvius, Mountain
New Historicism, 20-21
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 4

Opticks (optical devices), 16, 86-87,
93

Oxinden, Anne, 47-48, 138

Oxinden, Henry, 27,56,127

Paske, Dr., 59

Paulo, Fra. See Sarpi, Paolo

Paulson, Ronald, 97

Peacham, Henry, 87

Pembroke College, Cambridge, 52

Peterhouse, Cambridge, 23, 27,83-
84. I39

Peyton, Elizabeth, 86

Peyton, Sir Thomas, 47, 105

Philip 11 (King of Spain), 63, 73-74,
91

Philipott,John, 32, 37, 41

Pinion, Arthur, 79-80, 85

Plott, Dr., 88

Pomian, Krzysztol, 10,64, 76-77,
87, 103

Porter, H. C., 51-52

Portraiture, 115-16
Preud’homrne,Jean, 68-69, fig. 15
Prynne,J0hn, 117

Raymond,J0hn, 21, 58-59, 66-67,
77, 92, 1o0,107—8, 125
Representation, 20
in the theater, 110-11
Rome: 74-75
J. B.’s fascination with, 117
Venice, compared with, 109, fig.
23

Sanderson, Robert, bishop of Lin-
coln, 27

Sandys, Col. Edwyn, 59
Sandys, Sir Edwin, 39
Sarpi, Paolo, 2,15, 53, 112-13, 120
Self-fashioning, 32, 64 ff., 104
Selleck,John, 127
Shaftesbury, Earl of, 2
Siena, 66-67

courtesy of inhabitants, 66
Sommerard, Alexandre du, 104
Spada, Cardinal, 19, 106-7
Stewart, Susan, 90
St. George, Sir Henry, 37
Stone, Lawrence, 38
Stoye,John, 69 ,
Sturman, Thomas, 124, fig. 28

Taylor,J0hn, 35-36

Thomas, Nicholas, 89
Tradescant,J0hn (Elder), 5
Tradescant,John (Younger), 5
Travel, 1, 66-74

See also Grand Tour

Trevor-Roper, Hugh, 50, 57

Venice, 53, 92, 109-10
Rome, compared with, 109, fig. 23
Vermeer,Johannes, 17, 23-24, 64
Vesuvius, Mount, 71-72, 88, 1oo,
142, fig. 16


Index

Virginia, 30, 96, 137 Warwick, Earl of, 138
Virginia Company, 33, 39-45, 50, Wilde, Frances (wife of J. B.), 91,
54 147
john Bargrave the Elder’s treatise Winchilsea, Earl of, 88
on, 42-47, 123 Wotton, Sir Henry, 31, 35, 52, 83, 112,
native American artifacts from, 114, 135
83, 86, 88, 96 Wren, Matthew (bishop of Ely), 52-
Virtuoso, 1-3 53, 57,117

152


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