THE ELIZABETHAN FLOWER GARDEN 
103 
probably a good sample of the more simple mounts of this date, 
although it cannot be so early as Elizabethan times. It was 
most likely made when the house was built, about 1620, and it 
was in its present state when Charles II. hid in the oak-tree 
hard by. The Battle of Worcester was fought on Wednesday, 
September 3rd, 1651. The Saturday following Charles spent 
in hiding in the “ Royal Oak/’ at Boscobel, and the next day 
" His Majesty, finding himself now in a hopefull security, spent 
some part of this Lord’s-day in a pretty arbor in Boscobel 
garden, which grew upon a mount, and wherein there was a 
stone table and seats about it. In this place he pass’d away 
some time in reading, and commended the place for its 
retiredness.” 1 Bacon planted and improved the garden of 
Gray’s Inn, and the summer-house which he made there in 
memory of his friend Jeremiah Bettenham in 1609 must 
have been very similar. It is thus described in 1761 soon after 
it had been destroyed and the ground levelled : “ Till lately 
there was a summer-house erected by the great Sir Francis 
Bacon upon a small mount: it was open on all sides, and the 
roof supported by slender pillars.” 2 This was placed so as to 
command a “ prospect over the neighbouring fields as far as 
the hills of Highgate.” 
The mount was not always a circular lump standing out in 
the garden ; it appears that it was still sometimes banked up 
against the outside wall. Bacon describes this kind also : “ At 
the end of both the side grounds,” he writes, “ I would have 
a mount of some pretty height, leaving the wall of the enclosure 
breast-high, to look abroad into the fields.” The erections 
placed on the top of mounts did not do away with the use of 
other arbours in less exposed places in the garden. Some 
“ arbour o’ergrown with woodbines,” 3 or “ pleached bower 
where honey-suckles ripen’d by the sun, forbid the sun to 
enter,” 4 were sure to be found in a secluded spot. “ You 
1 Boscobel, or the History of His Sacred Majesties most miraculous 
Preservation after the Battle of Worcester, 3 Sept., 1651, by Thomas 
Blount,, 1660; reprint, 1822. The illustration is taken from this 
work. 
2 Quoted in Gray’s Inn, Douthwaite, 1886. 
3 Fletcher, Faithful Shepherdess. 
4 Much Ado About Nothing, Act III., Scene 1. 
