336 
THE COTTAGE GARDENER AND COUNTRY GENTLEMAN, March 5, 1801. 
closet of curiosities when they died, and at last resolved to give it 
unto me.’ 
“Two days afterwards (on the 14th) they had given their 
scrivener instructions to prepare a deed of gift to that effect, 
which was executed by Trcdescant, his wife being a subscribing 
witness on the 16th, as Aslimole records with astrological 
minuteness, ‘ 5 lior. 30 minutes post meridian.’ On May 30th, 
1662, little more than a month after John Tredescant’s death, 
he records— 
“ ‘ This Easter term I preferred a bill in Chancery against 
Mrs. Tredescant, for the rarities her husband had settled on me.’ 
“Dr. Hamel succeeded in finding the protocols in this suit 
among the records of the Court of Chancery, in which Ashmole 
sets forth that in December, 1659, he visited the Tredeseants in 
South Lambeth, and that he was entertained by Tredescant and 
his wife with great professions of kindness. That Mrs. Tre¬ 
descant told him that her husband had come to the deter¬ 
mination to bequeath to him ‘ the rarities and antiquities, bookes, 
coynes, medalls, stones, pictures, and mechanicks contained in 
his Closett of Raryties, knowing the great esteeme and value he 
put upon it.’ That Tredescant himself had afterwards said to 
him, that in acknowledgment of his (Ashmole’s) previous 
trouble concerning the preparation of the catalogue of his 
museum and gardens,* he purposed to do so, and that in effect 
Ashmole and Mrs. Tredescant, as long as she lived, should 
enjoy it together. Ashmole also says, Tredescant had made it 
a condition that he should, after Mrs. Tredescant’s decease, pay 
a certain Mary Edmonds, or her children, £100 sterling. That 
he did then actually let a deed be prepared, by which he made 
over to him his collection of every kind of curiosities of nature 
and art within or near the house (Ashmole here cunningly 
includes the botanic garden), Mrs. Tredescant was to have the 
joint proprietorship, and nothing was to be abstracted from 
the collection. 
“This deed Tredescant had, on the 16th of December (1659), 
confirmed under his hand and seal. Mrs. Tredescant fetched a 
Queen Elizabeth’s milled shilling, which Tredescant handed over 
to him, together with the conveyance, and thereby he came into 
possession of the collection.f 
“ Mrs. Tredescant had signed the deed as witness; but, when 
Ashmole was about to leave the house, she had requested him to 
leave it with her, as she wished to ask some of her friends 
whether, by having signed it as witness, her right as joint pro¬ 
prietress of the collection might not be diminished. He left the 
document w T ith her, in expectation that it would soon be re¬ 
stored to him, but this was never done. Now, after the death of 
Tredescant, she maintains that her husband never made such a 
conveyance; but the truth is she has burnt or destroyed it in 
some other manner. 
“ Against this Mrs. Tredescant refers to her husband’s last 
will and testament of the 4th of May, 1661, by which all pre¬ 
vious dispositions of his property, of whatever kind, were de¬ 
clared invalid, and strongly urges that the Museum was expressly 
bequeathed to her and her alone, with the stipulation that she 
should leave it either to the University of Oxford or to that of 
Cambridge ; and she adds, that she had determined to leave it 
to the University of Oxford. 
“ Whether it was Ashmole’s influence, or that the equity of 
the case was on his side, is uncertain ; but the Court of Chancery 
decided in his favour, and he was declared the proprietor of the 
Tredescantian Museum. He obtained, without being able to 
produce any written document which declared his right to the 
possession, all that the two Tredeseants, father and son, had with 
inexpressible trouble, and by means of many voyages, brought 
together in their Museum and Botanic Garden. 
“ The judgment of the Lord Chancellor (Clarendon) was : 
“ ‘ He, Ashmole, shall have and enjoy all and singular the 
bookes, coynes, medalls, stones, pictures, mechanicks, and anti¬ 
quities, and all and every other the raryties and curiosities, of 
what sort or kind soever, whether naturall or artificial!, which 
were in John Tredescant’s Clo3ett, or in or about his house at 
* In the preface to the catalogue the assistance of two friends is men¬ 
tioned ; it appears that the other was Dr. Thomas Warton. 
+ Ashmole says, “ It was not thought fit to clogge the deed with the 
payment of the said hundred pounds to Mrs. Edmonds or her children, fo 
the end that the same might better appear to he a free and generous gift, 
and. therefore, the consideration of the deed was expressed to he for the 
entire affection and singular esteeme the said John Tredescant had to him 
(Ashmole), who he did not doubt would preserve and augment the said 
rarities for posterity.” He declares that he will pay the money; and in 
his “Diary” we find that after Mrs. Tredescant’s death, in 1G78, he pays 
to a Mrs. Lea, probably one of the daughters of Mrs. Edmonds, £100. 
South Lambeth the 16th December, 1659, and which were com¬ 
monly deemed, taken, and reputed as belonging or appertaining 
to the said Closett, or Collection of Rarities, an abstract whereof 
was heretofore printod under the tytle of Museum Tredescan- 
tianum.’ 
“ Mrs. Tredescant was adjudged to have merely during her 
life a kind of custody of, or guardianship over, the collection, 
‘ subject to the Trust for the Defendant during her life.’ 
“ The Lord Chancellor further decreed that a commission 
should be named to inquire whether everything was forthcoming 
which was named in the Catalogue; in order that if anything 
was missing she should be constrained to replace it, and give 
security that nothing should be lost in future. The com¬ 
missioners appointed to carry into effect the Chancellor’s decree 
were, however, two persons with whom Ashmole must have 
been on terms of intimate friendship—namely, Sir Edward Bysli 
and Sir William Dugdale, both Heralds like himself; and with 
the latter he at length became most intimately connected by 
marrying his daughter. To them was also added, in his official 
capacity, Sir William Glascock, a Master in Chancery. Tre¬ 
descant’s widow, as may be imagined, did not very quietly 
submit to this, as it seemed to her, unjust decree ; but all her 
endeavours at opposition were fruitless—she was constrained to 
yield, and it seems probable that the depressing influence of 
this struggle affected her so much as to cause her death. She 
was found drowned in the pond in the garden cultivated by her 
husband and his father at South Lambeth, on the 3rd of April, 
16 78. 
“ Whatever may have been the legal or equitable right of 
Ashmole upon which the decree in Chancery was founded, it is 
impossible for a generous mind to come to any other conclusion 
than that the course he pursued was unworthy of him as a man 
of education, and of his wealth and station ; for it must be 
obvious from the will of Tredescant, that even supposing he had 
willingly and wittingly made a deed of gift of his treasures to 
Ashmole, and given him formal possession by handing over the 
Queen Elizabeth’s shilling, it is next to impossible to believe 
that Ashmole did not know that he repented that act, and 
wished to connect his own name with the bequest to the 
University.”—( Notes and Queries, v., 368, 385.) 
“The loss of her husband’s treasures, says Mr. Rimbault, 
probably preyed upon the mind of Mrs. Tradescant; for in. the 
Diary before quoted, under April 4, 1678, Ashmole says— 
“ ‘ My wife told me that Mrs. Tradescant was found drowned 
in her pond. She was drowned the day before at noon, as 
appears by some circumstance.’ 
“ This was the same Hester Tradescant who erected the Tra¬ 
descant monument in Lambeth churchyard. She was buried in 
the vault where her husband and his son John (who ‘died in 
his spring’) had been formerly laid. 
“ The table monument to the memory of the Tradescants was 
erected in 1662. The sculptures on the four sides are as 
follows—viz., on the north, a crocodile, shells, &c., and a view of 
some Egyptian buildings; on the south broken columns, Corin¬ 
thian capitals, &c., supposed to be ruins in Greece, or some 
Eastern country; on the east, Tradescant’s arms, on a bend 
three fleurs-de-lys, impaling a lion passant; on the west, a 
hydra, and under it a skull; various figures of trees, &c., in 
relievo, adorn the four corners of the tomb; over it is placed a 
handsome tablet of black marble. The monument, by the con¬ 
tribution of some friends to their memory, was in the year 1773 
repaired, and (according to Sir John Hawkins) the following 
lines, ‘j formerly intended for an epitaph, inserted thereon.’ 
Other authorities say that they were merely restored. 
“ Know, stranger, ere thou pass, beneath this stone 
Lye JohD Tradescant, grandsire, father, son; 
The last dy’d in his spring; the other two 
Liv’d till they had travell’d Art and Nature through, 
As by their choice collections may appear, 
Of what is rare, in land, in sea, in air ; 
Whilst they (as Homer’s Iliad in a nut) 
A world of wonders in one closet shut; 
These famous antiquarians that had been 
Doth Gardeners to the Rose and Lily Queen, 
Transplanted now themselves, sleep here ; and when 
Angels shall with their trumpets waken men, 
And fire shall purge the world, these hence shall rise, 
And change this garden for a Paradise.” 
— (Ibid., iii., 354.) 
“ In a visit made by Sir W. Watson and Dr. Mitchell to 
Tradescant’s garden in 1749, an account of which is inserted in 
the ‘ Philosophical Transactions,’ vol. xlvi. p. 160., it appears 
that it had been many years totally neglected, and the house 
