Solitude and Soul in Restoration Britain

In 1667 the Restoration diarist John Evelyn crossed swords with a young Scottish lawyer named George Mackenzie - later Sir George Mackenzie, Lord Advocate of Scotland - over the merits of a solitary life. Mackenzie’s A Moral Essay, Preferring Solitude to Publick Employment (1665) combined fierce censure of the vanities and corruptions of public office with a battery of arguments designed to prove that ‘nature, inclination and pleasure, vote all for Solitude’. The treatise Evelyn wrote in reply, Publick employment and an Active Life Prefer’d to Solitude, mounted a strong defence of civic life alongside a swingeing attack on solitude as an immoral and debilitating state, ‘fitter for Bedlam…[than] for sober men’. ‘[I]f Nature, Inclination and Pleasure vote (as is pretended) for Solitude,’ Evelyn quoted back at Mackenzie, ‘…[then] Nature is deprav’d, Inclination propense to Evil, and Pleasure itself, if not simply evil, no moral virtue.’

The exchange raised eyebrows. Evelyn was well known for his love of solitude while Mackenzie made no secret of his political ambitions. Modern interpreters treat the debate as a literary joust, a playful display of mock-argument in a classic late-Renaissance mode. A letter from Evelyn to his friend, the poet Abraham Cowley, would seem to confirm this. ‘[A]s those who prays’d dirt, a flea, and the gowte, so have I Publiq Employment in that trifling essay’, he joked to Cowley, another lover of solitude, reassuring his friend that his passion for ‘recesse’ was as strong as ever. For his part, Mackenzie responded to Evelyn’s rebuttal with a note congratulating him on his suasiveness, ‘and to evidence how much I am proselited by your booke, I resolve to continue in imployment…’. The two men later met and were ‘friendly reconciled’. But despite these humorous disclaimers, the debate was far from trivial, showcasing an ambivalence about solitude that, in Evelyn’s case at least, ran deep, shaping his life choices, his sense of self, and one of his most significant personal relationships, with a young courtier named Margaret Blagge (later Godolphin).

Today John Evelyn is remembered for the diary that he kept from 1640, when he was twenty, until just before his death in 1706. The publication of the complete Diary in 1955 was a landmark in seventeenth-century studies. Evelyn’s reflections on the state of England during the Interregnum and Restoration; his vivid, up-close descriptions of major political events; his shrewd reflections on the arts, religion and science: all these made his Diary an invaluable source. Evelyn was an influential courtier and a polymath; a notable figure in his day. But the features of his career that lent him prestige among his contemporaries – his intermittently close relationship with Charles II; his horticultural experiments and writings; his environmentalism; his founding role in the Royal Society – are now the purview of historians specialising in these topics. His debate with Mackenzie seldom gets more than a passing reference. At the time however it attracted a good deal of attention in educated circles, partly because of Evelyn’s authorship but also because solitude mattered in Restoration Britain. These were decades when secular and spiritual solitude were, in related ways, flashpoints of contention. Many of the arguments were, as we shall see, very old, but the times gave them new significance and energy. Solitude was an intellectual, spiritual and emotional space rich with contested meanings whose range and depth have not been fully appreciated. John Evelyn’s passion for solitude, especially as manifested in his relationship with Margaret Blagge Godolphin, provides a window into this space, illuminating a history that has had insufficient consideration.

Women rarely contributed to public controversies over solitude but the disagreements had deep implications for them, especially for solitude-loving women of whom there were many in Evelyn’s world. Margaret Blagge Godolphin was one of these women, and in charting her relationship with Evelyn in the decade following his literary contretemps with Mackenzie we see how issues raised in the debate ramified through the entwined lives of two Restoration courtiers. And because these courtiers were a man and woman who loved solitude with and for each other, their story reveals how 'solitude' could be simultaneously shared and enacted very differently by individuals of different genders.

*

Of all the human eternals, solitude is possibly the least historically investigated, especially by intellectual historians. In recent decades loneliness has attracted much attention, especially in relation to its health impact. By contrast, solitude is perceived as a much happier condition. The contrast is omnipresent, including in academic circles. Even during the extended periods of enforced solitude during the Covid pandemic, commentators of every stripe distinguished the loneliness experienced by so many from the pleasures and benefits of solitude.

The loneliness/solitude distinction is modern, a nineteenth-century invention. In earlier centuries ‘solitude’ did service for both, as it does still in many languages. But this ‘solitude’ and its many cognates - retirement, retreat, withdrawal, ‘recesse’ - have almost entirely eluded the historical gaze. In recent years publications have begun to appear, but prior to this century there were only a handful of English-language scholarly studies, alongside a much larger number of popular works promoting solitude as a lifestyle choice. This neglect is the more startling because solitude has been a site of intense controversy in western thought for millennia. The Mackenzie/Evelyn debate had a very long intellectual pedigree.

Writing to Evelyn about the exchange, Abraham Cowley placed it within the tradition of argumentation over the opposed claims of the vita activa and the vita contemplativa, ‘one of the noblest controversies both modern and ancient’ as he flatteringly described it to his friend (the ‘action/solitude’ controversy as it was also known). Originally couched as politics versus philosophy (as rehearsed in the works of Plato and Aristotle), this controversy had proven remarkably fertile, spooling out a string of antitheses - negotium (public busyness) vs otium (private life, leisure, contemplation), practice vs theory, society vs self, city vs country, civil vs savage, service vs freedom, conversation vs silence - whose valuations and cultural weight shifted over the centuries but whose underlying concern, the enduring question on which all these oppositions turned, was the perennial puzzle of homo solus: what is man alone? What is this state called solitude? ‘[W]hat solitude is, and what the solitary man is’ (Epictetus) was as ambiguous as it was contentious - and this despite (or because of) the question being aired in in so many set-piece debates during the Renaissance that in 1580 Montaigne had dismissed it as an ‘outworne’ topic (before devoting an essay to it). ‘Little do men perceive what solitude is, and how far it extendeth’ Francis Bacon had declared in 1612 (before giving his own definition of it). Another half-century of debate, and by the time Evelyn and Mackenzie added their voices to the mix ‘solitude’ was a palimpsest of competing meanings and associations.

The exchange between the two men showcased this, drawing on Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, Epicurus, Lucretius, St Paul, St Augustine, Aquinas, Bacon and many others to argue the case for and against solitude as self-sufficiency (‘self-love’), leisure (‘sloth’), meditation (‘fancy’), pleasure (‘lust’) and other ancient and modern iterations of the vita solitaria. No female thinker featured in their dispute despite several women, most notably the writer and scientist Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, having published defences of solitude. Yet within a decade the gender implications of the debate would become a pressing concern for Evelyn in his relationship with Blagge Godolphin.

Evelyn declared his to be the minority position: ‘he [Mackenzie] has all the Topics and Discourses of almost all the Philosophers who ever writ; and while he declames for Solitude, I am forc’d to tread the most unfrequented and solitary paths’. For a latter-day Renaissance Humanist such as Evelyn this was disingenuous: the solitary life had always been viewed equivocally at best, more often with strong disapproval. By and large Humanist opinion had followed the drift of classical thought as summed up in the Aristotelian maxim ‘Man is a political animal’ (reproduced on the title page of Evelyn’s treatise). Fulfilment came through active involvement in communal life; to opt out of society was unnatural, inhuman. For a divinely-inspired few – philosophers, saints, geniuses - solitude brought the noble joys of speculative wisdom, spiritual communion, artistic creativity; for ordinary mortals it spelled vice and debility. The solitary individual, in Aristotle’s famous apothegm, was either ‘beast or god’; in Christian iterations, ‘demon or angel’, ‘devil or saint’.

Renaissance thinking about solitude was led by negative valuations from the beginning, with civic Humanists quoting Cicero and the Stoics on the obligation to public service and even influential solitaries such as Petrarch insisting that solitariness was permissible only for the learned. (For anyone ‘unversed in literature’, Petrarch wrote, it ‘is more grievous than death.’) Admiration for the Christian eremitic tradition was offset by the call to good works and Aquinian counsel that only those who had achieved moral perfection were fit for seclusion; for the imperfect, spiritual solitude was ‘fraught with very great danger’. In fact danger was omnipresent for solitaries of every stripe. Petrarch’s ‘sweet solitude’ was marred by acedia (a mixture of ennui and gloom to which monks were especially prone). Michel de Montaigne’s later retreat into his tower was marred by wild imaginings, with his mind ‘bolt[ing] off like a runaway horse’, producing ‘so many chimeras and fantastical monstrosities’ that he decided to record them so as ‘to make my mind ashamed of itself’. Shameful fantasy, especially erotic fantasy, was a notorious peril of solitude (often Devil-inspired, it was said, as solitaries were famously vulnerable to diabolic interference); so too was the ‘melancholy humour’ from which Montaigne suffered intermittently. All solitaries - including, as we shall see, Blagge Godolphin - were prone to the miseries of melancholy. ‘Be not solitary, be not idle’ the Oxford don Robert Burton counselled in his compendious 1621 The Anatomy of Melancholy (part 3, 432), for those that are solitary risk ‘feare, sorrow, suspition…discontent, cares, and wearinesse of life’ .

The arguments did not all run one way. Petrarch’s model of solitude, involving intimate friends (although never any women), had staying power. The rise of Neoplatonism in the fifteenth century lent fresh prestige to the contemplative life while the sixteenth-century Stoic revival popularised prescriptions for the attainment of equanimity (apatheia) through mental retreat such as that advanced by Montaigne. Epicureanism, the only pro-solitude classical school, was more controversial, for reasons discussed below, but by the early seventeenth century it was flourishing in freethinking circles in Italy and France and gaining ground in England and Scotland. Horace and Virgil’s Epicurean-inspired paeans to the rural life of a ‘Happy Man’ far from the ‘maddened Forum’ had many imitators (including Evelyn, who in the 1650s tried his hand at a Horatian ode). Restoration discussions of solitude were littered with classical adages, including the perennial ‘Nunquam minus solus quam cum solus’ (‘Never less alone than when alone’) attributed to Scipio Africanus. ‘A very vulgar saying’, Cowley complained of it : ‘Every man and almost every boy for these seventeen hundred years has had it in his mouth.’

Nevertheless, by the time of the Mackenzie/Evelyn exchange the perception of solitude as prejudicial to all but sages and the saintly remained the dominant view, with even solitude champions like Cowley reprising it. ‘Very few persons’ according to Cowley were ‘well fitted’ for solitude: ‘if the mind be possessed with any lust or passions, a man had better be in a fair than in a wood alone’. Only the most ethically robust were inculpably solitary: for everyone else ‘[t]his is but to retreat from men, and fall into the hands of devils’. But if virtue was requisite to the vita solitaria, what about the vita activa as it was interpreted by Restoration royalists like Mackenzie and Evelyn?

As Peter N Miller has shown, the expansion of the lettered world from the mid sixteenth century had seen a move away from the Aristotelian/Ciceronian vita activa to a vita civile centring on ‘conversation’ (sociability) as the hallmark of a civilised society. To opt out was no less culpable than hitherto, but the grounds of condemnation were shifting from civic disengagement to incivility; to what would later become, in Enlightenment philosophical anthropology, a fixed equation between solitude and primitive savagery. ‘[W]hoever leaves Civile Society…to place himself in some solitary Desert,’ Stefano Guazzo wrote in his very influential Civil Conversation (1574), ‘deserves not only the Name, but actually possesses, in a great Measure, the very nature of a Brute.’ This change of emphasis is readily detectable in the Mackenzie/Evelyn debate, yet its chief polemical focus remains the classical model of civic engagement, ‘public employment’, a model whose continuing salience is not hard to understand in an age of intense, transformative political conflict.

Readers of the debate were well primed for it. For Royalists, the preceding decades had given fresh appeal to the retreat ideal. During the civil wars many Royalist gentry had retired to their estates rather than fight, and the Interregnum left many more with no option but political withdrawal or exile. Royalist poets steeped in classical retirement tropes turned to the Romans for inspiration. Withdrawal from ‘the noise and pompe of this world’ into a ‘private grove’ in Horatian/Virgilian mode became a popular literary motif, turning defeat and political exclusion into voluntary abstention from civic life. And while the Restoration offered new possibilities for political participation, a kingship that even stout Royalists like Evelyn were soon condemning as a ‘most contemptible thing’ made public office increasingly problematic.

Mackenzie’s pamphlet plunged into this predicament in provocative mode, sweeping aside moral concerns about the vita solitaria, insisting on the innocence of a retired existence against the vicious passions of public life. To be a ‘statesman’, Mackenzie insisted, is to be tortured by unappeasable ambitions, locked into ferocious rivalries for power and wealth until life is nothing but ‘envy, malice and mistake’. Against this, Mackenzie evoked the ‘divine state’ of solitude

wherein a virtuous inactivity fortifies us against all these inconveniences and begets in us a tranquillity, not conceivable by such as do not possess it.

Mackenzie is remembered now as ‘Bloody Mackenzie’, a soubriquet acquired in the late 1670s when as Lord Advocate of Scotland he mounted a ferocious persecution of Presbyterian opponents of Charles II. This represented a startling volte face. As a young man in the 1660s he had been one of many in Scotland’s elite who strongly resented the high-handed manoeuvrings of the King and his Scottish commissioners. The fierce disgust with public ethics displayed in Solitude Preferr’d was thus, as David Allan has pointed out, no mere ‘empty display of casuistical skill by a government loyalist’ but a ‘thinly veiled critique of Restoration Scottish politics issued by a man…deeply unsettled by its taste for authoritarianism.’ Mackenzie dedicated the treatise to the Earl of Crawford who after a chequered military and political career had retired to his estate in the early 1660s, as had many other disaffected Scots. So while the damning descriptions of public life in Solitude Preferr’d were hyperbolic, they drew on political grievances common to many in the Scottish gentry, some of whom, ‘unwilling or unable to expose themselves to the risks of active participation’ in Restoration politicking, had judiciously retired to their estates. It’s easy to imagine these men nodding at Mackenzie’s polemics against the knavery of statecraft. The pamphlet did well, as did Evelyn’s, with Mackenzie’s reprinted twice in London after its initial 1665 Edinburgh publication and Evelyn’s reprinted within twelve months of publication.

For an educated readership, much of the exchange would have been commonplace. Both treatises pit men of public affairs against ‘private men’ in terms grown hoary from centuries of action/solitude contention. For Mackenzie, ‘solitude’ is living simply and frugally, avoiding temptation and enjoying ‘country recreations’. For Evelyn it is a slothful, selfish life-choice, at variance with serving one’s country and performing social service. Yet despite the oppositionist rhetoric the two treatises have much in common. The widening of the vita activa to civil sociality allows ‘conversation’ to be claimed by both. Solitaries cited by Mackenzie (Socrates, Aristotle, Christ, his and Evelyn’s much-admired contemporary Robert Boyle) appear as exemplars of the vita activa in Evelyn’s rebuttal. And - unsurprisingly, given his political ambitions - Mackenzie’s rejection of public life proves far from total.

Like most men of the Restoration gentry, Mackenzie and Evelyn had been raised in the Ciceronian ethos of public service. ‘No man, says Cicero is born for himself,’ Evelyn quoted the famous apothegm while Mackenzie, having devoted the bulk of his treatise to attacking civic involvement, concluded with the same allusion:

…the Countrey must be served and man is not made for himself…Who is so absurd as to deny his Countrey that service, which is really but the return of its protection?

A country that serves and protects its people deserves their active participation. And unless ‘the Commonwealth be secure, even the slothful man…cannot enjoy his sloth,’ Evelyn pointed out in refutation of Mackenzie’s on-and-off abstentionism. The argument was indisputable, but it was a difficult time to be making it. For what do a people owe to a polity when, instead of protecting them, it sacrifices them to autocratic corruption? Here Evelyn and Mackenzie looked to the same authority. The Stoic statesman-philosopher Seneca had served as advisor to Emperor Nero. As Nero’s reign turned murderous Seneca retreated to his country estate, from where he wrote an essay defending retirement from public life when rulers become despotic. ‘If ever…Retreats be justifiable,’ Evelyn paraphrased him, ‘‘tis when Tyrants are at Helm, and the Common-wealth in the power of cruel persons’. When ‘the wicked…rise,’ Evelyn went on, quoting Proverb 28, ‘men hide themselves’. To serve a vicious regime was no man’s duty.

Apart from Seneca, the case for political withdrawal had its major classical source in Epicureanism. Alone among the major Greek philosophers, Epicurus had championed otium over negotium, calling on his followers to ‘release ourselves from the prison of affairs and a politics’ and retire into a life of tranquil contemplation among books and friends, including female friends, in a secluded garden setting. To ‘live obscurely’, aloof from court and city, was the ideal, which - combined with Epicurus’s atomistic materialism, debunking of religion, and celebration of pleasure as the highest good - had long made the Garden, as the Epicurean school was known, highly contentious. For nearly two millennia Epicureanism had represented the dark side of classical thought: an anti-social, atheistical, hedonistic philosophy appealing only to the voluptuary. But the gradual warming of early modern opinion noted above had accelerated by Evelyn’s day, especially among natural philosophers attracted by Epicurean atomism and Royalist retirement poets such as Abraham Cowley.

The key text for the transmission of Epicurean ideals into European intellectual life was the poem De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) by the Roman writer Lucretius. Mackenzie’s treatise leaned heavily on Lucretius, eliciting strong objections from Evelyn who decried Lucretius as an ‘impious poet’ and Epicurus as the ‘Patron of the Idle’. But this was mere polemic, with both men borrowing Lucretius’s theatrical imagery of public affairs as a ‘wretched’ scene best witnessed from ‘serene heights’: a ‘Comedy’, as Mackenzie wrote, to be viewed from a ‘safe solitude’; a ‘Masquerade…of dissimulation’, according to Evelyn - a judgement which hardened as Charles II’s court sank ever deeper into sleaze and violence.

Yet despite these similarities, and the playful spirit of the debate, Mackenzie and Evelyn differ sharply in their representations of the good life. Mackenzie is a defender of individual pleasure, advocate for an easeful existence so disengaged from others that it verges on the solipsistic. Evelyn equates personal excellence with social conscience, and his occasional impatience with Mackenzie’s ‘useless’ philosophy appears heartfelt, despite his later disclaimers. Yet of the two, it was Evelyn for whom solitude was a life-essential, an abiding need that was to prove a source of difficulty for him throughout his long, often very public, life, reaching an emotional climax in his passionate solitude à deux with Margaret Blagge Godolphin.

**

As the son of a prominent Surrey family, Evelyn always expected to hold public office. He spent much of his early adulthood travelling on the continent, acquiring a cosmopolitan education and a lively young wife named Mary Browne. Preparing to return to England in 1651, he wondered whether he might be offered a post in Cromwell’s government. Unsurprisingly, he concluded not: ‘I shall therefore bring over with me no ambitions at all to be a statesman, or meddle with the unlucky Interests of Kingdoms…A Friend, a Booke, and a Garden shall for the future perfectly circumscribe my utmost designes.’ The Epicureanism of the vision was not incidental. In 1666 Abraham Cowley dedicated his Epicurean essay and poem ‘The Garden’ to Evelyn. Returning the compliment, Evelyn dedicated a horticultural work to Cowley in which he commented again on their shared love of solitude: ‘who would not like You, Cacher sa vie?...I swear to You, Sir, it is what in the World I most inwardly breath after, and pursue.’

‘Cacher sa vie’ was an Epicurean motto. In the mid 1650s Evelyn translated the first book of De Rerum Natura. Exactly why he undertook this isn’t clear, although his friendship with the leading English Epicurean Walter Charleton may have been a factor. In 1657 Charleton published The Immortality of the Human Soul, a set of dialogues featuring a virtuoso named Lucretius who was based on Evelyn. Like Cowley, Charleton emphasised the abstentionist element of Epicurus’s philosophy, his counsel to ‘avoi[d] the tumults of a civill life’ in favour of ‘a state of highest silence and tranquillity’. The appeal of this to Evelyn during the Interregnum may also have led him to Lucretius, although the poet’s irreligion worried him sufficiently that he prefaced his translation with a careful disclaimer of any sacrilegious intention. At any rate, once back in England his quietism gave way to a much more defiant mood, and he actively supported efforts to bring Charles II to the throne, even becoming entangled in a coup plot in 1659. The following year he greeted the Restoration with great joy, confident that it heralded a return to stability and prosperity for the troubled kingdom.

The joy didn’t last. Very soon he was bitterly disillusioned, lamenting the ‘vanity and vices’ of the court to his friend Samuel Pepys. Jobs he had undertaken for the King, including an exhausting decade with the commission for sick and wounded seamen during the Dutch wars, had been undermined by royal penny-pinching; other proposed projects had come to nothing. Charles’s inner circle of ‘magnificent Fops, whose talents reach but to the adjusting of their Peruques’ sickened him. ‘Believe it,’ he wrote sardonically to Mackenzie, ‘to conserve one self in Court, is to become an absolute Hero.’ By the autumn of 1666 he was ready to throw it all in. A relative, Sir Samuel Tuke, urged him to stay the course: ‘there is greate need of such men as you are in the publike charges of our Contrie….the active life is to be preferd to the contemplatife’. So he ploughed on, always hungering for the ‘infinite felicitie’ of a retired life while financial pressures and an ever-present sense of civic duty pushed him into public commitments. Still on the eve of the Glorious Revolution he was insisting to a friend that to undertake ‘things Beneficial to Mankind, [and] the Government’ was the obligation of every man of ‘Eminent Station’. Nevertheless, as for himself,

I have preferr’d the Recesse of near Thirty-Yeares, during which…I have found nothing Solid, nothing stable and worth all this hurry, disquiet, and expense of Time; but the pursuit of Moderate things for this Life…

Foremost among these ‘Moderate things’ were horticulture and natural science. Evelyn’s passion for both is well-documented. His beautiful garden at Sayes Court in Deptford attracted visitors from across Europe, some of whom also stopped to admire his well-stocked laboratory where he carried out chemical and botanical experiments. In the early 1660s he helped to establish the Royal Society, whose work he tirelessly promoted for the rest of his life. In 1662 he presented a report to the Society on the state of the nation’s timber which two years later was published as Sylva: A Discourse of Forest-Trees and the Propagation of Timber in His Majesty's Dominions, the first book issued by the Society and his best-known work. With Sylva, Evelyn cemented his reputation as a gentleman of culture and learning, a ‘virtuoso’. His friendship network widened to include many of the leading thinkers of the day, turning his garden into a ‘kind of outdoor salon, an extension of London’s literary and intellectual life’. Yet the location of his home and garden, smack up against the Deptford docks only a few miles from Westminster, vexed him. ‘I do with all my heart wish for more Solitude, who was ever most averse from being neere a greate Citty…’ He dreamed of ‘Monasticall Societies’ populated by ‘learned and ingenuous men’ dedicated to the advancement of learning. In 1659 he wrote to his friend Robert Boyle proposing the creation of just such an intellectual retreat modelled on the Carthusian monasteries, where ‘gentlemen…who desire nothing more than to give a good example, preserve science & cultivate themselves’ would ‘live profitably and sweetly together’ (along with Mary Evelyn, the only woman who would be admitted to the community). Boyle’s reaction is unrecorded but as a fellow lover of solitude (and a bachelor) he is likely to have expressed interest. For here was a way of reconciling social withdrawal with public service, ‘a useful segregation of the wise’ as Claire Preston says of the project, ‘aimed at the improvement of knowledge for the good of all’: an ambition shared by Boyle and most of their fellow savants.

The scheme came to nothing - unlike gardening, which afforded Evelyn a socially sanctioned solitariness throughout his adult life. Garden retreats were modish in Restoration Britain; to withdraw to a shady arbour with a devotional text or a book of poetry was a mark of cultural refinement. But for Evelyn garden solitude was no mere fashion but a passion, providing him with ‘glorious Recesse’ of the kind that ‘I most inwardly breath after, and pursue’. In his Diary Evelyn attributed his love of leafy seclusion to the remote Surrey countryside of his infancy, the ‘affection to which kind of solitude I succked in with my very milke’. The memories operated powerfully, producing dreams of Arcadian retreats modelled on legendary gardens of the past, including Epicurus’s Garden in Athens. The scientific community he proposed to Robert Boyle was to be set in just such a locus amoenus, a ‘Garden of pleasure’ whose ‘aire and genious’ would ‘operat upon humane spirits towards virtue and Sanctitie’. The Edenic visions inspired a steady stream of practical innovations in garden design and techniques, tested out at Sayes Court (where the endless redesigning and replanting had Mary Evelyn rolling her eyes) and publicised in books and treatises dedicated to conveying the ‘most precious Rules of this Mysterious Art’.

But it was the garden as a setting for religious contemplation, a site for solitary prayer and meditation, that held the deepest meaning for Evelyn. Gardens ‘naturally dispose our Spirits to Religious Contemplations,’ he wrote in Sylva, a theme developed at length there and in his Elysium Britannicum, a huge, unfinished work which included a lengthy history of religious practices in natural settings and instructions for constructing features such as caves and grottoes to make gardens ‘{fit} for retirement & {holy} solitude’. Ideal gardens such as that imagined in his Elysium were ‘of all terrestrial enjoyments the most resembling Heaven’, he rhapsodised, inducing ‘pious ecstasies’ in their beholders.

Solitariness was a lifelong desideratum for Evelyn but it was his faith that made it into a moral requisite, a precondition for what his biographer describes as an ‘essentially private’ Anglicanism. In his twenties Evelyn had flirted with Roman Catholicism. The flirtation had been brief but its legacies were apparent in his ongoing attraction to monastic models of social organisation and his adoption of solitary devotional practices in the style of continental Catholics such as Francis de Sales and pre-Reformation clerics such as Ignatius Loyola and Thomas à Kempis. Kempis’s precept that ‘[h]e…that seeketh to reach that which is hidden and spiritual, must go with Jesus "apart from the multitude”’ chimed with Evelyn’s commitment to rigorous self-examination as a prerequisite to salvation. To ‘introvert our contemplations’, to ‘withdraw and ananchorize [sic]’, was ‘highly necessary…to the holy life’, he explained in an unfinished work on the history of religion, ‘this, this alone is the only way to know our souls, and our selves’. Replying to a 1656 letter from his spiritual advisor Jeremy Taylor cautioning him against over-investment in the worldly charms of Sayes Court, Evelyn hurried to reassure his mentor of his indifference to such ‘outward things’: ‘the censure of singularity would no way affright me from embracing an Hermitage if I found they did in the least distract my thoughts from better things.’ In later decades, as his family grew, Evelyn had a ‘little cell’ built in his home where he stayed for extended periods, meditating and praying (while Mary attended to his meals and other needs). On reaching his sixtieth birthday he closeted himself away for a week to survey his life and make his peace with his Maker. Where is the ‘Seacret Cabinet of Contemplation which onely thy humble ones enter into?’ he begged God in his manual of devotions written for Margaret Blagge Godolphin: ‘Shew me the Bed where thou reposest thyself with thy sincere solitarie humble soules, who rest in thy boosome in the midst of this noysie empty world! That with them I may be in peace?’

This recourse to solitude as means to a profounder communion with God was characteristic of many devout Anglicans of Evelyn’s day. Reading the bible, praying and meditating on the liturgy in the privacy of one’s closet, aided by popular devotional manuals such as Edward Wetenhall’s Enter into thy Closet (1666) or Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living (1650), were springboards to a genuine piety, freed from what George Mackenzie, in Solitude Preferr’d, decried as the ‘gaudy distractions, whereby our public devotions are almost rendered no devotion at all’. Unlike public displays of religiosity, which encouraged ostentation and hypocrisy, private exercises of godliness were a touchstone of true faith. These solitary devotions were not designed to supersede public devotions; rather, as Erica Longfellow has shown, they existed on a continuum, with private worship serving as a preparation for, and meditation on, church service. Nevertheless, a high degree of spiritual reclusiveness was a hallmark of the sincerely devout, the primitive Christian for whom solitude served as ‘a true forge of the purest devotions’, unalloyed by worldly vanities and diversions.

Yet solitude was also distrusted and derogated. The ambivalence had characterised Christianity from the beginning Patristic opinion had veered between praise for solitude as a privileged setting for divine communication and condemnation of it as corrupting, debilitating and in violation of God’s law of brotherly love. The opposition had carried on through the ancient and medieval church, into reformed Christianity where it lost none of its force: from Luther on, spiritual solitude was hotly contested by Protestants of all denominations. The influential divine Richard Baxter spoke for majority opinion when he argued that to ‘retire from human converse into solitude’ was to forsake ‘the place and work which God hath appointed us’: a dereliction of duty, he averred, permissible only to specific groups (the sick and elderly; people too weak-willed to withstand worldly temptations), and to those select individuals who had been called to solitude by God – although even this final group, Baxter argued, were often deluded: ‘they will perhaps imagine, that they are serving God, and entring in perfection, when they are but sinfully obeying their corruptions.’ Domestic worship in the privacy of the family circle was commendable as a complement to public worship, but closet devotions ran all the usual hazards of solitariness: pride, self-love, melancholy, ‘diseased fancy’, diabolic influence. Better, many argued, to seek out God within the recesses of the soul than risk such perils. Even strong advocates of closet worship such as Jeremy Taylor favoured withdrawing into ‘your Chappel, [your Heart]’ over Catholic-style devotional retreat. Protestant propagandists caricatured hermits and monks as superstitious, licentious, and devil-ridden. In his rebuttal of Mackenzie Evelyn did likewise, deriding the desert fathers as ‘hypocondriacs, singular persons, and Authors of much superstition and unprofitable severity’, and slamming ‘Eremites’ as ‘the most superstitious of men’: ‘there is not in the world a life more repugnant to nature’ he pronounced.

In common with many of his fellow Anglicans, Evelyn also condemned solitude as a breeding ground for Puritan sectarianism and political conspiracy. ‘What are all our truculent Champions of the Fifth-Monarchy...but so many Persons the highest affected with Solitude and devout Enthusiasm?’ True faith was collective and rational, not singular and fanatical; the good Christian looked to the Church for divine guidance. ‘The most instructive motives to Religion are from our imitation of others, and the incentives of devout Congregations’. Having lived through the proscription of Church of England services in the 1650s, Evelyn was passionately loyal to the Church’s traditional liturgical and sacramental practices. He was a dedicated sermon-goer, travelling across London to hear ‘excellent Preaching’, and a regular and ardent communicant. ‘If there be an heaven upon Earth’, he wrote in one devotional work, it was to be found ‘at the Holy Assembly & Action [of communion] devoutly celebrated’. Righteousness was spiritually but also practically communal, comprising acts of charity as well as collective worship. ‘Let us grant that some Devotions are best performed in our Closets,’ Evelyn wrote in reply to Mackenzie, ‘yet does the life of a Christian consist only in the wearing the marbles with our knees?’ After all, he pointed out, Jesus had been a very busy man: ‘It is true our Saviour…sometimes retired to pray…[but] he was all day teaching in the Temple, or continually going about doing good.

Like most Restoration Anglicans, Evelyn held that good works - the Christian vita activa - were as integral to righteous living as personal piety; private faith must not override social obligation. Obsessive recourse to the prayer closet was a ‘self-love principle’, he counselled Margaret Blagge Godolphin eight years later, as she struggled with her conflicting desires to marry and raise a family - the female version of the vita activa - or to retreat into lifelong religious seclusion. For Evelyn, the dilemma was painfully familiar. The ambivalence that had marked his debate with Mackenzie reappeared as he strove to balance his sense of social obligation against his yearnings for recesse, above all for the spiritual recesse which framed and nurtured his relationship with God.

Yet this religious solitude of Evelyn’s was a complex psychological state, a setting for high emotions and inner conflicts that at times threatened to overspill their devotional context. Evelyn has been characterised a joyless character, a ‘dry old stick’ as one unfriendly commentator describes him. In fact, as Frances Harris says of him, he was a driven, unsatisfied man, one propelled by ‘a restless passion’ after ‘something more…perfect and consummate’ than the quotidian satisfactions of his busy life. For much of his adulthood he looked heavenward for this perfect something, but in his fifties he found its earthly incarnation in Blagge Godolphin, a deeply pious young woman whose ‘soul’, as Evelyn later said of her, ‘was always in the Cloister’. The two became emotionally entwined, forming a ‘seraphic friendship’ that dominated Evelyn’s life until Blagge Godolphin’s death in childbirth in 1678.

Evelyn’s circle included a number of women known for their partiality to solitude, among them Mary Rich Countess of Warwick, Margaret Cavendish and the poet Katherine Philips, an intimate of Jeremy Taylor and Abraham Cowley, whose poems in praise of solitude were widely admired, including by Mary Evelyn. Mary herself was no recluse but in 1660 she readily agreed to John’s proposal that she join his lay monastery, to dwell among the scholars ‘in our cells’, as she put it in a letter to him. 93. A later letter to her friend Ralph Bohum commended the retired life in the stock language of the action/solitude debate: she would rather, she told Bohum, be a ‘Hermit…who fights only with himself, who Enimies [sic] are his passions, and…who reserves his triumph for another world’ than have a life of ‘noyse and tumult’. Perhaps this element in Mary’s thought contributed to her later befriending of Margaret, whose piety she much admired and whose conflicting desires for marriage and a life of spiritual withdrawal aroused her sympathy.

Yet a preference for the vita solitaria was even more controversial for women than for men. This was not new. Gender-based inequalities of status, resources, entitlements; assumptions about women’s capacities and responsibilities, especially familial responsibilities: these had long shaped women’s relationship to solitude. Women with a marked preference for solitude - even elite women - tended to be suspect. The exception of course was in Catholic Europe where women with a recognised religious vocation were often, although not always, entitled to withdrawal. But in Protestant England single women and widows might endure aloneness but a woman hankering after it, especially a married woman, violated gender norms. The classical models on which men might draw to legitimate their solitariness - Seneca, Pliny, Cincinnatus - were irrelevant to women, and the power to choose seclusion was disallowed to all but a few. But while a vita activa of civic or even civil participation might be closed to them, domestic activity, a vita familia of household busyness, was requisite. Within this, spiritual solitude was permissible - but only up to a point. Intermittent withdrawal to the prayer closet was commendable, but a woman who yearned for a life of religious retirement was suspected of papist tendencies or accused of low-church ‘enthusiasm’.

Moreover, as the weaker sex women were deemed acutely vulnerable to solitude’s perils, most dangerously the machinations of the Devil. A woman going about alone risked devilish seduction into witchcraft or some other ungodly misdeed, of which Eve’s crime was the example sans pareil. ‘The more distant [a woman] is from her husband, the more adjacent she is to Sin’, Giovanni Loredano wrote of Eve, in his popular Life of Adam (1649). Nowhere in Genesis is Eve depicted as alone when she picks the forbidden fruit, yet nearly all early modern commentators on the Fall, including Evelyn, described her as having wandered off from Adam. ‘I have some where read, that but for Eves curiousity, which prompted her to stray from the company and presence of her Husband, the Serpent…had never found opportunity to tempt her,’ Evelyn wrote in his reply to Mackenzie; the text to which he referred here was almost certainly Paradise Lost, published earlier that year, where Milton depicts Eve cajoling Adam into gardening apart for a time, with its usual disastrous consequence.

Apart from his brief comment on Eve, Evelyn’s only reference to female solitude prior to his friendship with Blagge Godolphin was a snide observation, in Public Employment Prefer’d, about women’s inability to experience the tranquillity classically associated with solitude, due to their envious and prideful natures. Like the rest of that text, the remark was more rhetorical than heartfelt. Evelyn was no misogynist; in general, his attitude to women blended respect with low-key conventional prejudice. He praised learned women (including Margaret Cavendish, whom he dubbed ‘Zenobia’ after the warrior queen of Palmyra), and approved education for girls, although with the caveat that too much knowledge in a woman was ‘apt to turn to impertinence and vanity’. Female piety he unequivocally admired while expecting to take the spiritual lead; that any woman might hold religious sway over him was, for much of his life, unthinkable. But in his middle years this assumption crumbled under the impact of Blagge Godolphin’s pietistic fervour, especially her passionate attachment to solitary prayer, which invested Evelyn’s own spiritual solitude with new intensity and meaning.

**

Evelyn got to know Margaret Blagge Godolphin in 1672, when she asked him to advise her on her financial affairs. She was then twenty years old and a court veteran, having served as maid of honour to the Duchess of York for six years before moving over to Queen Catherine’s household on the Duchess’s death in 1671. Like John, Margaret was county gentry, in her case an East Anglian family fallen on hard times. Her father died when she was twelve, leaving her mother to raise four daughters in straitened circumstances. Court service, with its light duties and excellent marriage opportunities, appeared the best option, and at fourteen Margaret followed her elder sister into the York household. For women, court employment carried none of the Ciceronian weight that it had for men; maids of honour were merely expected to be young, pretty and amusing. Margaret was all three, and for a time she enjoyed her new life, with its dressing-up and dancing and gossipy banter. But the happiness was short-lived. A decade into Charles’s reign, his court had become a sink of sexual predation. Female courtiers were subject to an endless stream of lewd commentary, and worse, from the King and his cronies. Margaret loathed such ‘filthinesse’, but her looks and charm had men buzzing around her until she removed herself from the sexual marketplace by becoming affianced to a page of honour named Sidney Godolphin. They married in 1675, following a bumpy eight-year engagement; three years later she died of puerperal sepsis after giving birth to a son.

Margaret’s aversion to court life was reinforced by her piety. Her mother, Mary Blagge, was a devout Anglican who inducted her daughter early into devotional habits. Even as a small child Margaret had displayed strong religious convictions. At court, she retreated regularly to her rooms for solitary prayer and meditation, urging Sidney to do likewise. He was abroad on King’s business a great deal and she missed him. In 1670 Mary Blagge died. With her mother gone and Sidney absent for long periods, Margaret felt isolated and forlorn. Turning to God for comfort, as she had since she was a child, she found herself gripped by a new spiritual ardour. Reading and re-reading her bible, her ‘mind wholy taken-up with heavenly Thoughts’, her devotional life took fire. She repudiated all worldly pleasures, allowing ‘more time for...the performance of holy-Dutys, then before I had ever don’ and finding ‘infinite Pleasure in it’. Loving God became her raison d’etre, and lone worship her driving need. ‘Be alone as much as you can,’ she counselled herself. ‘How good it is,’ she wrote in her devotional diary, ‘to be often solitary and alone relieved from continual and impertinent company that we may be in conversation with Angels.’

Female piety of this intensity was not unusual in Margaret’s world. Women were said to be the more religious sex, ‘more propense and inclinable to holiness than men’, and the evidence supports this, showing women of the upper and middle class to be the most dedicated lay practitioners of Anglican devotions. ‘Devotion is so generaly conspicuous in the Femal Sex,’ John wrote to his friend Robert Boyle, ‘that they furnish the greater part of […] the Letanys, and whom if we may not pray to, we ought certainely praise God for.’ Devotional handbooks addressed to women praised their godliness and urged them to augment it through regular recourse to the prayer closet, with the usual proviso that solitary devotions should complement rather than supplant public worship. Many women of Evelyn’s acquaintance retired to their closets, sometimes for an hour or more every day, for prayer and meditation. Those who sought greater solitude courted criticism. Nonetheless Boyle’s sister Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick, maintained a devotional regime which in later life, after her husband’s death, consumed over half her waking hours, most of which were spent alone. Rich had been at court but found that ‘there [is] much more happiness in retirement and conversing with God in solitude then in all the pleasures of the Court’. John, who knew Rich well, likened her to Margaret, although to his mind no woman equalled Margaret in holy living, except possibly his own daughter Mary, thirteen years Margaret’s junior, whose devotional life was modelled on Margaret’s, including extended periods of solitary prayer and meditation where she ‘shewe[d] the feare and love she had to God, and Care of Improving her-selfe and others’, until her much-mourned death at age nineteen.

Had Restoration England sponsored Anglican nunneries, women like Mary Evelyn, Mary Rich and Margaret Blagge might well have sought entry into one of these. Writing to John in 1675 Margaret expressed her approval of French ‘Nuñarys [which] seeme holy Institutions; if they be abused it is not their fault’. Other Protestant women of similar views went on to establish religious retreats. In 1625 Mary Ferrar, her son Nicholas and her many daughters set up a community of ‘religious retirement’ at Little Gidding in Cambridgeshire, later commended by John. Toward the end of the century two sisters, Mary and Anne Kemeyse, formed a small Anglican community at Naish court in Somerset. ‘Protestant nunneries’ like these for the unwed were endorsed by many Anglicans, including John who in 1697 (perhaps with Margaret in mind) urged their benefits for single women ‘devoutly inclined’. In 1668 Margaret Cavendish published a play, The Convent of Pleasure, which depicted twenty unmarried women cohabiting in spiritual and intellectual harmony until jealous men destroy their community. Cavendish herself was ‘addicted from my childhood…to solitariness’, preferring to ‘sit at home and write…enclosing myself like an Anchoret’ than going about in company. Other lettered women likewise chose the writing desk over the assembly room; in the 1630s the Latin scholar Lettice Cary, Viscountess Falkland, urged the creation of retreats for such women where ‘learning and religion’ would ‘flourish more in her own Sex than heretofore, having such opportunities to serve the Lord without distraction’.

‘Distraction’ of course meant men and children, whose rightful claims to female attention were acknowledged by all, but with varying degrees of conviction. For the high Anglican Mary Astell (‘Madam Astalls of the most Sublime’, as John eulogised her), women’s primary duty was ‘salvation of our souls’, to which end she advocated the establishment of an academy for gentlewomen where they could dedicate themselves to holy living. She was charged with urging monastic seclusion on women (by another prominent woman intellectual, Damaris Masham) which she denied, insisting that her academy would be educational and house only single women and widows. But the religio-reclusive drift of her thought was plain as she counselled women to eschew ‘Trifles and Gaities and Secular Affairs’ in favour of a vita solitaria of religious study and observance. In their current benighted condition most women found solitude unbearable, Astell observed regretfully. But in her projected community, with no men to service, and with a rich spiritual education,

[s]olitude is no more insupportable; you’ve conquered that silly dread of being afraid to be alone, since Innocence is the safest guard, and no Company can be as desirable as GOD’s and his holy Angels...’

Solitude in Astell’s case also meant celibacy, which prior to the Reformation had been treated as a higher condition than married love. Some seventeenth-century Anglicans still regarded it in that light, but for most marriage was the more natural and meritorious state, especially for women whose primary duties were familial. Lifelong virgins like Astell were censured as unwomanly. ‘ T'is a sin against Nature for women to be Incloystred, Retired or restrained…’ Margaret Cavendish had a male character exclaim in a 1662 play.

Nay, it is not only a sin against Nature, but a grievous sin against the Gods, for women to live single lives, or to vow Virginity: for if women live Virgins, there will be no Saints for Heaven, nor worship nor Adoration offred to the Gods from Earth; for if all women be like Vir[gins], the Race of Mankind will be utterly extinguished….[T]hose women which restrain themselves from the company and use of men, are damned.

For Margaret Blagge, this longstanding opposition between virginity and marriage was not merely theoretic. At the time of her conversion she had been engaged to Sidney Godolphin for five years. She was very fond of him but Sidney’s frequent absences strained her affection, as too did his overindulgence in aristocratic recreations, including gambling, which worried her enormously. She urged him to spend more time alone, occupying himself with worthy tasks: bible reading, translating holy texts, studying ‘naturall things’ to concoct remedies for the poor - anything to avoid dissolute idleness. ‘[I]f you would once learn to entertain your self you would not set any great valu upon company,’ she wrote to him, ‘you find temptations abrode and yet you will not stay at home’. Sidney responded with fulsome assurances that he would abjure his worldly ways for a godly life, but Margaret’s unease grew. Should she break off the engagement? As her embrace of God tightened, she was wracked with indecision. She begged God to impart to Sidney the same spiritual exaltation she was experiencing. Yet she felt herself to be moving apart from him. ‘Yet I am not where I was. My Place is fill’d up with Him, who is All-in All. – I find in him none of that tormenting Passion to which I neede sacrifice my-selfe.’ Would marrying Godolphin violate her covenant with God?

Encountering Margaret at this fateful juncture, John was deeply impressed. He had met her briefly three years earlier and dismissed her as a typical female courtier, a ‘pert Lady’ with ‘more Wit, than Discretion’. Now he saw a woman transformed. ‘What a new thing is this? Whence comes she?’ he recalled asking himself. ‘I think Paulina, & the faire Eustochium are arriv’d from Bethlehem to Whitehall.’ The comparison to the Roman holy women who had accompanied Saint Jerome into the desert was one John was to make many times during his six-year relationship with Margaret. He watched her closely for a time, admiring her humble demeanour and pious conversation, until Margaret took matters in hand and invited him to visit her in her ‘holy Cell’. Her financial affairs were in a tangle and after a few weeks she asked for his help with them. By now he was so enthralled that he eagerly agreed and then, throwing caution to the winds, told her that he regarded any assistance to her as a sacred trust, that he was now her ‘Faithfull friend’, her soul-mate for life, and hoped for the same from her. Margaret smiled at this, but she understood what was wanted. Platonic relationships between the sexes were a Stuart fashion, introduced into Charles I’s court from the Parisian salons by Queen Henrietta Maria and lingering on into the Restoration elite, although with a stronger religious slant than in the flirty romances of Caroline courtiers. A treatise celebrating platonic love as a prefigurement of divine love, by the French Neoplatonist Francis de Sales, circulated widely in court circles with several men and women of John’s acquaintance forming platonic friendships along Salesian lines, including Mary Rich and Simon Patrick, the Royal Chaplain, whose works endorsing ‘seraphic amours’ as ‘preparation for…heavenly union’ were well known to John, who later recommended them to Margaret. So while Margaret may not have been looking for such a relationship, its meaning and purported advantages would have been very familiar to her.

Margaret was not the first woman John had befriended in this way. In the preceding decades he had enjoyed platonic relationships with several young women - his ‘seraphicks’, Mary Evelyn dubbed them - sending them coquettish epistles addressed to ‘Platona’ or ‘Cyparissa’ and being teasingly addressed in turn as ‘Diogenes’ and ‘Governor’. But with Margaret matters were far more serious. Here was a kindred spirit indeed, his ‘Electra’ as he dubbed her, ‘my onely friend (who is as my own Soule)’ he later wrote, and he sought to bind her to him in a spiritual betrothal marked by the joint signing of a sketch of an altar symbolising their union. ‘You have brought yourself into Bonds,’ he told her solemnly, ‘[that] you can never untie whilst you live...[a] Marriage of Soules...[whose] Laws...are Reciprocal and Eternal.’ Adding her signature to the sketch, Margaret wrote below it, ‘for my Brouther Euelyn’, ‘be this the symbal of our Inuioable friendship in I.H.S.’

The relationship that then unfolded - by turns poignant, bathetic and tragic - has been beautifully narrated by Frances Harris in her Transformations of Love. It was a peculiar coupling, between the fifty-two year old courtier-polymath and the woman three decades his junior, yet, as Harris shows, the ideal underpinning it, to ‘love on earth as...in heaven’, was no fashionable conceit but a commitment rooted in deep religious conviction. And the commitment, if not always the feelings driving it, was entirely reciprocal. ‘Never two people were more alike in their way and inclination’, Mary Evelyn observed, and the similarity became more apparent as the friendship progressed. ‘Friends are always Equal,’ John told Margaret in one of the many devotional texts he wrote for her, and in their case the platitude mostly held good. Margaret knew herself to be naïve and inexperienced and was grateful, at times overwhelmingly grateful, for John’s loving guidance. But she was also, as he soon discovered, a strong-willed woman, her humility and apparent pliancy offset by a devout purposiveness that could make her fiercely self-assertive.

Women in Platonic love rhetoric were exalted as human correlates of divine beauty and virtue; John’s letters to Margaret were littered with idealisations of this type. Margaret was openly impatient with such ‘complements’, making her ‘better than I seem’. She batted the praise aside. She corrected him when he misinterpreted her, pushed him back when his counsel became too overbearing, and on at least one occasion reproved him for being ‘too passionat’ in his addresses to her. On John’s part, by the time he met Margaret his faith, while still strong, had become routinized; the encounter with her spiritual ardency revitalised and transformed it. Male ego was still in evidence in the interminable, occasionally hectoring, advice he ladled out to her, as well as in his much-favoured image of himself as St Jerome with Margaret as his devoted St Paula or St Eustochium (Paula’s daughter). But as the relationship deepened he found himself awed by her religious dedication, noting with wonder the daily regimen she laid down for herself of incessant self-monitoring and prayers for every activity, including dressing (‘Whilst putting on Morning Clothes, say the…Te Deum’). Her week-long course of preparation for communion particularly impressed him and he soon followed her example so that, like her, he found himself in a ‘Continual State of Preparation’ for the sacrament, a condition of ‘perpetual oblation’ which engendered a spiritual joy greater than he had ever known. He felt himself a new man:

you have given me an heart, and carried away another….I bless God every-day for that Example of yours, which renders me better….Surely I do not flatter, when I write this, but in the presence of God, I blesse his name, and magnifie his Graces in you.

Female power takes many forms. To describe Margaret as a feminist would be grossly anachronistic, yet the feminist tradition certainly owes something to women like her. John’s description of her as one who ‘reveres her-self and does nothing below her dignity’ is well attested by her correspondence with him, and the counsel she gave to her sisters to behave always as ‘Ladys of Principles’, to love God and ‘Defeate the Devil’. Her much-praised humbleness and humility were signs not of subservience but of uncompromising spiritual commitment. Alone in her closet, Margaret wrote commentaries on the scriptures, including a note about the Annunciation where she described how the noble women of Galilee, hearing tell of the Messiah’s coming, had eagerly anticipated one of their number being chosen to bear Him. But ‘God sees not as man sees’, and bypassing the ‘great and wealthy’ the Archangel had arrived at the door of the young Mary ‘at prayer alone…full of humble thoughts touching her great unworthiness’, a ‘poor and pious chast holy humble solitary and silent vergin’ whose sacred destiny, Margaret concluded, showed ‘how great the happiness is of being alone…in conversation with angels: joining with them in praising god almighty our great creator and blessed redeemer’. The image of Mary praying alone (or reading the Bible, as in many pictorial renderings) served Margaret, as it did centuries of devout women, as a vindication of solitary devotion in the teeth of those who, as John put it in a letter to her, ‘are displeased at this kind of Solitude’, believing it to ‘proceed from moroseness, or some discomfort’. Such critics, he went on, were to be pitied for their misjudgement, as spiritual solitude ‘is one of the sweetest pleasures of life, and a peculiar happiness’.

With Margaret, John had found an intimate whose passion for solitude more than equalled his. Toward the end of her life Margaret thanked him for teaching her ‘the plesures of solitude and abstraction from things below’, but from their correspondence it seems that the stronger drive for solitariness came from her. For three years they prayed and dined together most Tuesdays and sometimes more often; but occasionally she wearied of his physical presence. She preferred his letters to being with him, she told him once. ‘[I]ndeed I love to see you, and be with you, but nothing obliges me so much as when you write to me’, she wrote. ‘…how much I wish you had time, and would now and then surprise me, why not now and then with one of your prayers…what does most affect you, and so help your friend forwards.’

Writing and reading letters socialised seraphic solitude. Scores of letters - incorporating biblical passages, prayers, extracts from inspirational texts and other spiritual aids - travelled between Margaret and John in the course of their relationship, serving as shared devotional scripts. With them came intimate accounts of personal ups and downs, reflections on their friendship and appeals to God - the omnipresent interlocutor - to assist them in their spiritual journeys. The solitude of physical apartness was mitigated by these epistolary exchanges, brokering a triangular relationship between the friends and God. Two years into their relationship, John introduced Margaret to ‘mental communion’, a private enactment of the sacrament employing spiritual exercises in the manner of Ignatius Loyola and Thomas à Kempis, a practice he had adopted during the Interregnum when Anglican services were proscribed. He drew up a manual of devotional exercises addressed to Margaret for use in her ‘privat Recesses’. ‘How pleasant,’ he wrote to her in one of these exercises, ’for devout Soules, to be assur’d, at whatsoever distance they chance to be separated from one another; that, thô they are absent in Body, they are present with the Lord.’ By now Margaret had left the court for the home of Lord and Lady Berkeley, where she was assured she would be ‘at her own Disposal’ with ‘no body to Observe, but God’. John’s exercises were welcomed eagerly into this ‘Sweete Retirement’. ‘I have letters of yours which break my heart to pieces at any time…’ she wrote to him, ‘and that…before Ye Communion, and that divine ejaculation of yours before receiving ye Sacrament O how heavenly they are, my dear friend, I blesse you….Now my mind is at rest for tonight. Send me those papers: I mean ye Mental Communion.’

Together or apart, his ‘deare Saint’ was always with him, John told her, while Margaret’s letters convey very clearly her acute awareness of him as a sacralised presence. ‘I have this day pray’d your Prayers; Thought yr Thoughts: Wish’d (I dare Say) your Wishes,’ she wrote to him.

I love you for god and som times I think I love god for you: you know how I mean: you often come into my mouth in my prayers in my thanksgivings for your example: in my confessions that I make no beter use of what I have reseaved from you: in my petitions that I may be like you: in my intercessions what think you are you left out no […] endeed I love you and […] by you will I be derected.’

By now John was deeply in love. A letter to Margaret chastising her for neglect after a brief cooling of their relationship described her as a ‘little thief’ who had stolen away his heart. ‘Give me that back againe if you can,’ he wrote flirtatiously, going on, half-anxiously, ‘Now would this look like a love-letter as any thing in the World, to any body living, who should light upon it, but you & I?’ But then, after all, he went on to point out, St Jerome’s letters to Eustochium had been even ‘more passionate’: ‘You would think the old Heremite realy in Love, and so he was, but it was divine, and doubtless very holy.’

God almighty knows my heart: [the letter went on] I do love you; but it is because you love him; Whilst we both determine our Affections here: we shall love each other in the most perfect fruition…

Unsurprisingly perhaps, passages like these have raised eyebrows, with at least one Evelyn biographer convinced that John was bent on seducing Margaret while other commentators react squeamishly to what a reviewer of Harris’s book describes as the ‘mildly unwholesome blend of piety and checked eroticism’ of the relationship. Harris herself sees matters differently, arguing that while it is ‘clear enough…that at one level Evelyn was “in love” with Margaret Blagge and knew that he was’, nothing in his dealings with her were furtive or seedy. Platonic friendships such as theirs were familiar to their contemporaries, occurring ‘in full view of their families…who were for the most part supportive and sympathetic’. If such a relationship ‘seems out of the ordinary to us,’ Harris concludes, ‘this may suggest that the period and the milieu in which it occurred are less easily understood than we have thought.’

It is good to be reminded that the ‘checked eroticism’ of one age may be the ‘seraphic amours’ of another. Yet a problem remains. For what goes on in full view is never of course the whole story, especially when much of the story, as in this case, takes place in the inner lives of its protagonists as they commune with each other together and apart. ‘Whatever you Love besides God alone; pray you may not love too much,’ John exhorted Margaret in one of his devotional exercises, while a letter to her offered up just such a prayer, asking God to grant that ‘this Love of ours, may be totally immersed in… Love of thee…consum[ing] all that is Earthy, and Sensual, and repugnant to thy Spirit of Holynesse.’ As a prefigurement of holy love, seraphic love transcended carnality. Yet the language in which John evoked holy love could be startlingly erotic: one devotional script he provided for Margaret’s private Sunday observances opened with the ejaculation: ‘Come Lord Jesus, come tell me ô my Joy, my Life, my Love, where Sleepest thou: I sigh after thee; thô thou art come to me I still want thee…’ The script went on to decry the ‘pleasures…[and] Sweetnesses’ of ‘worldly delights’ in favour of the rapturous union of the soul with Christ:

ô Ecŝtasie, ô unexpressible Favour! Ô overflowing goodnesse, to me unworthy, altogether unworthy – Refraine, ô Inlarge my heart, I am sick with Love! It can hold no more – yet ô sweete Jesu! delicious name! can ô give me more, & more of thy Love, none but thee, none but thee – Then onely shall I be satisfied, when thy Glory appears, Come Lord Jesus! Come quickly. Amen.

Using such language took John onto tricky ground. Not that its use was unknown in Anglican circles: John Donne and George Herbert’s sexualised devotional poetry was popular, and many influential divines described the soul’s longing for God in the vocabulary of physical desire: as a ‘seraphical fervour’, in Jeremy Taylor’s steamy phrase, ‘a torrent of pleasure for the voluptuous’. But the longstanding association between solitude and concupiscence made the deployment of such language by closet-worship advocates like John and Taylor problematic. In his Holy Living Taylor made great play of the distinction between desire for God and carnal desire, with particularly harsh words for the sin of Onan and the lascivious fantasies - ‘artificial and procured appetites of the mind’ - that stimulated this depravity. Any person assaulted by such unclean imaginings was advised to abjure solitude and ‘run forth into company’ where such lecherous thoughts were sure to ‘evaporate in the open air like camphor, being impatient of light and witness’. The theme was well-rehearsed among English divines who ‘even as [they] became advocates of solitary prayer…continued to worry about what believers might do when they were alone’. Devotional guidebooks, with their formulaic prayers and exercises, were designed to prevent such wanton ‘mind-wanderings’. John’s own devotional manual for Margaret made only one reference to such perils (‘let not Sinn enter the…doore…of phansy,’ he cautioned, ‘least it breake out into Act’). Less than a decade earlier, however, John had had plenty to say about the carnal risks of solitary fantasy in his debate with George Mackenzie.

‘Pleasure,’ Mackenzie had written, in line with popular Neoplatonist thinking about desire, ‘being in men, an act of fancy, and consequently of the soul’, waxes strongest when its source is the contemplative mind, as in the holy ecstasies experienced by the desert fathers, or the joy of Pliny contemplating Vesuvius. By contrast, ‘sensual pleasures’, because they ‘arise from external objects’, ‘do arrive but consequentially at that immaterial agent [the soul], and so they do move it with less vigour.’ The most powerful pleasures are not lubricious but the noble raptures of the lone mind. In reply, John offered numerous examples of solitaries enflamed by sexual fantasies, including David as he viewed the naked Bathsheba, the homosexual passions of Socrates and the ‘lewd recesses’ of Emperor Tiberius. Far from weakening the erotic imagination, the absence of external objects of desire, John argued, strengthens it: ‘our fancies operate more eagerly when alone, than when we are possessed of the object’. Temptations too shameful to countenance in the presence of an inciting object, run rampant in solitude. ‘[M]any things within us enslave us, even in the midst of Solitude. Were not the greatest Philosophers, nay even the Fathers of them severely taxed for the lowest pleasure, and the sins not to be named?’ In solitude men’s ‘vices find them out and attaque them’:

Doubtless there are many heinous sins which Company preserves us from, for it is even a shame to speak of some things, which are done by men in secret.

Did seraphic friends ever dream of such sins? Probably never consciously; the inhibition on imagining spiritual love in physical terms would have operated too strongly. Toward the end of his life John wrote of his ‘excessive affection’ for Margaret. He did not elaborate on this but it is highly unlikely that this excess was ever consciously sexual, whatever his unconscious was up to. His summary description of her in his Life, as a ‘Friend, in all the peculiar transcendencys of that relation’ captures well the ambiguities of their relationship. However, thirteen years before he formed his union with Margaret, John had an exchange of letters about platonic love which casts additional light on their relationship. His correspondent was Robert Boyle, who had recently published Seraphick Love (1659), a work that, like Francis de Sales’s Treatise on the Love of God, aimed to kindle divine love in its readership, but in Boyle’s case as an alternative to creaturely love rather than as its transcendent fulfilment. Love for a woman, Boyle wrote to an imaginary male correspondent, was ‘Devotion mis-addrest’ that should be redirected heavenward. John admired Boyle’s book but opposed this stance: ‘I cannot pronounce the love of the Sex to be…to the prejudice of the most Seraphic,’ he told his friend. ‘For if it [such love] be virtuous, it is neerest to the Seraphick, and what can ever be objected against it, proceedes from the vices of the Persons, deffect, or extreames of the Passion’. Love free from such ‘jealosies, disseases, follys…and the sensual’ is a blest state: ‘Take away this love, and the whole Earth is but a desert.’ The disagreement centred on conjugal love (John had been married for twelve years when the exchange occurred), but John’s willingness to align loving God to love for a woman undoubtedly found echoes in his ‘Marriage of Souls’ with Margaret which he declared superior to ordinary marriage because of its holiness, ‘beyond all Relations of Flesh and Blood’.

And Margaret? ‘I still love you more and more, I see you love me,’ she wrote to him on the first anniversary of their friendship vows; ‘I still love you more and more, I see you love God, this looks as if it were mad, but I write to a friend.’ A relationship initially sought out of practical need had become a mainstay of her emotional life. ‘Oh that I did love nothing but God and you,’ she told him. Yet she still loved her Sidney, who six years into their engagement was vehemently professing his desire for a godly marriage while doing little, as Harris notes, to prepare himself for it. He avoided Sunday chapel, continued to gamble, sought out court postings knowing full well that Margaret loathed court life. The country retirement for which she pined would be ‘too solitary’ for him, he told her. The couple argued, and relations soured.

Meanwhile life at Berkeley House was enmeshing Margaret in endless social obligations. Her yearning for religious retreat intensified; should she move elsewhere? She tested out possibilities. The dean of Hereford cathedral had long been her spiritual advisor and in 1674 she proposed to move to Hereford to live under his guidance. But this would terminate all marriage plans and she wavered, torn between Christ and Sidney - her ‘two Rival Lovers’ as John said to her. ‘The Lord help me’ she wailed to John,

I know not what to determine...One, whom I love is here; but I am got to other Company you see...for God has ben very gracious to me....Hee shall be my Love, my Husband, my All: I will keepe my Virgin, present it unto Christ, and not put my-selfe into the Temptation of Loving any Thing in Competition with my God.

The crisis, as it rumbled on over the months, was excruciating for Margaret. She became very ‘Pale & leane’, worrying John who had long expressed concern about her ascetic tendencies, especially her over-rigorous fasting which now became perilous. In fact the starving was of a piece with a depressive side to Margaret (her ‘Spleen’ as she named it, using the common term for melancholy) which had fretted John from the start but which had tightened its grip as the marriage conflict worsened. She slept little and ate even less, to the point of ‘not seldome Fainting in her Retirements’; her solitary devotions, always rigorous, became ‘monstrously unlimited and even superstitiously perplexing’, crammed with obsessive, guilt-laden rituals. Margaret’s God had always been a punitive figure, a ‘Severe Exacter’ was John’s phrase, of whom she harboured ‘Sad, and frightful Apprehensions’. John had worked hard to convince her of God’s benignity and her own entitlement to His love and mercy, and perhaps these reassurances had eased her anxieties somewhat. Yet self-recriminations and calls to penitence recur throughout her devotional papers while many of her letters to him express a toxic combination of self-dislike and despondency: ‘…the more I know my self, the les I like myself’ she wrote in one early letter, while a later one thanking him for a prayer went on drearily,

god knows I need it mighteley having now upon me a dismall sadness: I know not what to doe I have it so often…I believe it is my constitution….The lord help me I am seldom ever satisfied with my self: for I ever am in my opinon too merey or too sad: the world I valu not, som few fridns I love intierly, for other things methinks I am indifferent: they love me against I am perswayded, why then am I sad? god knows, I suer I doe not: but this I know that in this earthy tabernacle I shall always grone till I am clothd upon with my house which is from heaven.

The death-wish recurred in later correspondence, along with a fearful anticipation of death in childbirth which was to prove all too prescient. Were her incessant ‘breathings after solitude’ - as John sharply described her reclusiveness in a worried letter - contributing to this misery? John suspected so (which later made him anxious lest his daughter Mary imitate Margaret’s self-punitiveness). By the time she announced her wish to retire to Herefordshire he had convinced himself that thus ‘abandoning her-self to Solitude must soone have ruin’d her health and made her Unhapy’. Much better she marry than suffer such a fate.

Yet for John too Margaret’s predicament was very painful. The possibility of her remaining celibate, wedded to him only in their chaste marriage of souls, appealed strongly to him, as he admitted to her. Yet if remaining unwed entailed retiring into religious seclusion in Herefordshire or elsewhere, this deeply dismayed him, partly because he was sure it would be bad for her, partly because he couldn’t bear to be parted from her, but also because the proposal resonated so strongly with John’s own retirement yearnings. Counselling Margaret at this crucial juncture, the echoes of his debate with George Mackenzie are easy to hear. ‘It is not enough to say you can be happy alone, when you can make another so too,’ he wrote to her, ‘[how] much more laudable the real doing of Good…than Thinking and Speculation’. Did she not want to be ‘a use-full membe[r] to the state in which you live?’ he demanded, going on to list the charitable, familial and neighbourly duties of a wife. ‘Marriage, he acknowledged, had ‘sometimes its traverses’, but her conviction that she would ‘not be hapy unlesse she were alone’ was ‘a selfe-love Principle’. There was ‘ten times more exercise of virtue in the Married condition than in the Celibate,’ he concluded; and then too, he reminded her on a more pragmatic note, in Protestant England a religious life for women had no institutional backing. Thus, ‘the Decencys of her Sex, and Custome of the Natione…and the want of Monaster’rys & pious Recesses’ all obliged her to marry, he told her.

Margaret conceded the force of his arguments, ‘yet I am still wher I was, wishing to live alone, I can’t but thinke it most suitable to my humer and the nearest way to heaven’. Nevertheless the Hereford plan was abandoned, leaving her struggling with her conflicting desires until finally in May 1675 she and Sidney slipped off to the Temple Church and married on the quiet. John was not told, and it was to be another year before he discovered that his spiritual spouse was now Sidney’s wife. He was hurt by her secretiveness but soon became reconciled and the friendship continued, albeit at a lower temperature, until her post-partum death two years later: a death Margaret seems to have expected and possibly even desired. ‘She seem’d to thirst after nothing more, than to be with God,’ John later recalled in his Life before quoting from a letter, the last she wrote to him before she died, in which she expressed her disillusion with ‘all the Satisfactions of the World:’

Realy, Friend: There is nothing in it [the world] to be chosen for it-selfe: Is not Eating to satisfy the paine of Hunger? Sleep to ease our Wearynesse, & other divert’sments to take off the Mind from being too Intent on things that it cannot always beare, without greate Inconvenience to its facultys? Retirement againe, is to Discharge it of that Burden, and the staines it has Contracted by being in Conversation, & Impertinent Company: So that upon the Matter, our whole life is (in my Opinion) an Inquiry after Remedys, which do often (if not always) Exchange, rather, then Cure our Infirmity…’

Now there was nothing she wanted more, she told him, than to cast off these miseries and ‘ever be with the Lord’.

In his Life John praised this display of pious resignation but it is easy to sense his bewilderment and distress as he records her farewells (her final letter to Sidney apologised for her ‘Melancholy and Splenetick’ nature) and her careful preparations for death as childbirth approached. And the death, when it came, was horrible in its physical suffering and devastating in its emotional impact, leaving him (and Sidney) ‘in sorrow unspeakable’. As usual he sought solitude, shutting himself away to grieve a bereavement that was also a profound self-loss. ‘He who loses his friend, loses half of himself, is dead whilst alive, because half of him was in his friend,’ he wrote in his commonplace book. ‘[W]e were but one Soule, as aboudance of her professions & letters in my hands testifie’ he told his Diary as he began compiling the papers into his Life, which as well as creating a ‘permanent Record of her perfections’ served to reinvoke the woman whose absolute absence, for a time, immured him in a loneliness so unbearable that he too yearned to die. Meanwhile Sidney, reeling with misery, turned to John for comfort and the two men clung together, sharing their loss in a correspondence that overflows with their suffering. ‘I bleede within my-selfe, the Chanel is too narrow to contain overflowing Griefes,’ John wrote to Sidney on the first anniversary of her death.

She is continually with me, ever before me, always in my thoughts…I lost in that happy Creature all Relations: she was neither Wife, Mother, nor Sister to me: but she was something which is above them all; but which has no name in this world.

It took both men a long time to adjust to their loss. Court duties called to Sidney and he reluctantly resumed them, encouraged by John: ‘You are perpetually in public business, and I am glad you are so, because you are else too much Soule, that is (according to Des Cartes) in continual Thought, which is prejudicial to you; and this would I have by any means diverted.’ John too sought diversion from public offices (and money, at a time of straitened circumstances); he renewed his intellectual labours and promotional work for the Royal Society. Many years after his exchange with Mackenzie, life had once again pushed John into the age-old opposition between the vita activa and the vita contemplativa, but now with social action as an antidote to obsessive brooding on Margaret, ‘that incomparable Saint’ whose loss had been the ‘dark Night’ of his soul. Throughout the western solitude tradition the sundering of soul-mates has been one of the most persistent and poignant representations of loneliness. Debating solitude with Mackenzie, John had referred at one point to the fate of the solitary who ‘die[s] even before death’. For him, as for many bereaved believers, the death of his beloved ‘Electra’ was a loss of this order, a solitude of privation never to be remedied ‘on this side Heaven’.

Solitude’s history unfolds. As I write this article the intimate connection between solitude and personal loss is everywhere evident. The Covid pandemic grips the globe, with enforced solitude once again in play. Never before has solitude been so topical. We must all hope that it soon loses some of its current relevance even as we seek a deeper understanding of its long, controversy-ridden history.

*This essay is dedicated to the memory of Frances Harris (1950-2021) whose Transformations of Love (2002) inspired and informed it, and whose tutoring in reading seventeenth-century correspondence enabled me to research it.

This article has been long in the writing and I have accumulated many debts along the way. The main one is to Frances Harris, but I also wish to thank warmly the following: Sally Alexander, Norma Clarke, Angus Gowland, Catherine Hall, Kate Hodgkin, Cora Kaplan, Erica Longfellow, Lyndal Roper, Lynne Segal and William Tosh, and above all, Alexandra Walsham. I also wish to thank all my fellow workers on the Pathologies of Solitude project (James Morland, Tasha Pick, Akshi Singh, Clare Whitehead, Charlie Williams), and Hannah Dee, who checked the references. Any remaining errors are my own.

George Mackenzie, A Moral Essay, Preferring Solitude to Publick Employment, And All it’s [sic] Appanages: such as Fame, Command, Riches, Pleasures, Conversation, Etc (Edinburgh, 1665); facsimile edition 1666, ed. Brian Vickers, Public and Private Life in the Seventeenth Century: The Mackenzie-Evelyn Debate (Delmar, New York, 1986), 16.

John Evelyn, Publick Employment and an Active Life Prefer’d to Solitude, and all its Appanages, such as Fame, Command, Riches, Conversation, Etc. In Reply to a late Ingenious Essay of a Contrary Title; Vickers, Public, 229, 154-5.

Ibid. xii -xiii. ‘…’twere pretty’, Evelyn wrote ‘To the Reader’, ‘if at last it should appear, that a Publick Person has all this while contended for Solitude, as it is certain a Private has done for Action’, 135.

Ibid. x-xii.

Esmond Samuel De Beer, ed, The Diary of John Evelyn, six vols (1955; Oxford University Press, 2012).

Vickers’s Private and Public Life is the outstanding exception, with an excellent introduction. The few other discussions of the debate are examined below.

I discuss this in ‘Solitary Citizens: the Politics of Loneliness’ (The Guardian, 27 June 2020). For more on this, see the website of the Wellcome Trust funded ‘Pathologies of Solitude’ research project at Queen Mary University of London: https://solitudes.qmul.ac.uk/

Philip Koch, Solitude: a Philosophical Encounter (Chicago, 1994) is a wide-ranging history of ideas. There were a small number of German and French studies, including Johann Zimmerman’s hugely influential Ǖber di Einsamkeit (1784-85; English trans 1791). See also Robert Sayre’s valuable Solitude in Society: A Sociological Study of French Literature (Cambridge, Mass, 1978) and Jay Macpherson, The Spirit of Solitude: Conventions and Continuities in Late Romance (New Haven, Conn., 1982). By contrast, the popular literature on solitude as a lifestyle choice was vast; Henry Thoreau’s Walden, or A Life in the Woods (Boston, 1854) was a huge influence. For recent important studies see Diana Webb, Privacy and Solitude in the Middle Ages (London, 2007); Stephen Bending, Green Retreats. Women, Gardens and Eighteenth-Century Culture (Cambridge, 2013); David Vincent, A History of Solitude (Cambridge, 2020)

Vickers, Public, xii.

Epictetus, ‘What solitude is; and what a solitary person’, Discourses, 3.13 (108CE). Trans. Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Boston, 1865): ww.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0237%3Atext%3Ddisc%3Abook%3D3%3Achapter%3D13; Michel de Montaigne, ‘On Solitude’, The Complete Essays, Trans. Intro. and Notes, M A Screech (London, 2003), 267-278.

Francis Bacon, ‘Of Friendship’ (1597), The Major Works (Oxford, 2002), 390–1.

Hero Chalmers, ‘The Politics of Feminine Retreat in Margaret Cavendish’s The Female Academy and The Convent of Pleasure’, Women’s Writing, 6:1 (1999).

Evelyn, Publick, 134.

Aristotle, The Politics (c340BCE) (Cambridge, 1996), 13. The thirteenth-century Latin translation of The Politics by William of Moerbeke rendered the Aristotelian definition of man as ‘animal sociale et politicum’, and this was then influentially quoted by Thomas Aquinas in the treatise De regimine principum (Thomas Aquinas, Political Writings, ed. and trans. R. W. Dyson, Cambridge 2002), p. 50. So by the seventeenth century the understanding of ‘political’ as ‘social and political’ was deeply entrenched and Evelyn’s usages of the word reflect this. My thanks to Angus Gowland for pointing this out.

.

Aristotle had written: ‘he who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is

sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god’: Politics, 14.

Noel L Brann, The Debate Over the Origin of Genius During the Italian Renaissance (Boston, 2002), 48-67, 223-232; Francis Petrarch, The Life of Solitude (1346-56), 2 vols, trans. and intro. Jacob Zeitlin (Urbana Ill, 1924), i,131. Here Petrarch is probably reworking Seneca’s ‘leisure without study is death; it is a tomb for the living man’ (Seneca, Moral Epistles, 82; 63-65 AD, trans Richard M Gummere, 1732): https://www.loebclassics.com/view/seneca_younger-epistles/1917/pb_LCL076.243.xml?readMode=recto. However, as P O Kristeller has pointed out, many early Italian humanists ended up advocating some combination of activity and contemplation ( ‘The Active and the Contemplative Life in Renaissance Humanism’, in Studies in Renaissance Thought and Letters, 4 vols (Rome, 1956-96), vol. 4, ch. 12, 197-213).

Petrarch, Solitude, i,131.

St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (1265-73), II-II, Q.188, 8.

Brann, Origin of Genius, 52-53; see also Zeitlin, Intro., Petrarch, Solitude, 85-86.

Montaigne, ‘On Idleness’, Essays, 31.

M A Screech, Montaigne and Melancholy. The Wisdom of the Essays, 1983 (London, 2000)

Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) (New York, 2001), 432, 241-249.

The Petrarchan ‘solitude’ involving only male friends was in line with the Aristotelian/Ciceronian model of friendship; see Reginald Hyatte, The Arts of Friendship. The Idealization of Friendship in Medieval and Early Renaissance Literature (Leiden, 1994). The arguments were echoed by Montaigne (‘Of Affectionate Relationships’, ‘On Three Kinds of Social Intercourse’, Essays, 210, 928).

The Neostoic Justus Lipsius’s On Constancy contains a famous discussion of the pleasures of retreat in gardens (book 2, chs 1–3), and advocates solitude and withdrawal from the crowd (1584; trans Sir John Stradling 1595, translation revised and introduced by John Sellars (Liverpool, 2006).

Virgil, Georgics II; Maren-Sofie Rostvig, The Happy Man: Studies in the Metamorphoses of a Classical Ideal, 2 vols (London, 1971); John Evelyn, The State of France (1652), ed William Upcott, The Miscellaneous Writings of John Evelyn Esq (London, 1825), 49.

Abraham Cowley, ‘Of Solitude’, ed. L C Martin, Abraham Cowley, Poetry and Prose, 1949 (Oxford, 2012), 78.

Ibid. 79.

Peter N Miller, Peiresc’s Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century (London, 2000), 49-75.

Stefano Guazzo, The Art of Conversation in Three Parts…Interspers’d with Many Foreign Proverbs and Pleasant Stories (1574), trans. George Pettie, 1581 (Delhi, 2017), 17.

Vickers, Public, xx

Henry Vaughan, ‘Flores Solitudinis (1654), H G Wright, ‘The Theme of Solitude and Retirement in Seventeenth Century Literature’, Études Anglaises, 7:1 (1954), 30.

Samuel Pepys, Diary, eds R C Latham and W Matthews, 11 vols (London, 1995), vii, 29.

Mackenzie, Solitude, 27

Ibid.

David Allan, ‘”In the Bosom of a Shaddowie Grove”: Sir George Mackenzie and the Consolations of Retirement’, History of European Ideas, 25.5 (1999), 263. Allan gives a sympathetic reading of Mackenzie’s treatise as an impressive blend of neo-Stoicism (on which Mackenzie had previously published an essay) with the ‘dangerous authority’ of Lucretius (264).

Ibid. 259.

Mackenzie, Solitude, 96-7.

Evelyn, Publick, 144,146,148,153, 154.

Joseph M Levine, Between the Ancients and the Moderns. Baroque Culture in Restoration England (London, 1999), 9.

Evelyn, Publick, 147; Mackenzie, Solitude, 95.

Evelyn, Publick, 151-2.

Seneca, De Otio (On Leisure) (c62CE), trans Timothy Chandler: https://www.monash.edu/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/1764312/seneca.pdf. ‘If the commonwealth is so corrupt that it cannot be helped…the sage will not… be useful if he expends himself for nothing.’

Evelyn, Publick, 159.

Ibid.

Epicurus, The Extant Remains, ed. Colin Bailey (Oxford,1926), Fragment LVIII. https://archive.org/stream/EpicurusTheExtantRemainsBaileyOxford1926OptimizedForGreekOnLeft/Epicurus-the-Extant-Remains-Bailey-Oxford-1926%20Optimized%20for%20Greek%20on%20Left_djvu.txt

Evelyn, Publick, 137, 151

Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, trans. John Selby Watson (Amherst, NY, 1997), 54; Mackenzie, Solitude, 89; Evelyn, Publick, 175-6.

Evelyn, Publick,156.

John Evelyn [hereafter JE] to William Prettyman, 2 Dec 1651, Douglas D C Chambers and David Galbraith, The Letterbooks of John Evelyn, 2 vols (Toronto, 2014), Letterbooks, i, 103-4.

John Evelyn, Kalendarium Hortense (1666), ‘To Abraham Cowley, Esq’, Upcott, Miscellaneous, 429.

Walter Charleton, Epicurus's morals collected partly out of his owne Greek text, in Diogenes Laertius, and partly out of the rhapsodies of Marcus Antoninus, Plutarch, Cicero, & Seneca ; and faithfully Englished (1656), 63.

John Evelyn, An Essay on the First Book of T Lucretius Carus, De Rerum Nature, Interpreted and Made English Verse (London, 1656). https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A88639.0001.001/1:3?rgn=div1;view=fulltext. See Gillian Darley, John Evelyn, Living for Ingenuity (London, 2006), 141-6, for Evelyn’s anxious struggles with the irreligiosity of the text.

Darley, Evelyn, 60,65.

Pepys, Diary, vii, 29.

Frances Harris, Transformations of Love: the Friendship of John Evelyn and Margaret Godolphin (Oxford, 2002), 50. ‘A court is but a pretty misery,’ he observed in his commonplace book (Ibid. 61).

Evelyn, Publick, p 176.

Darley, Evelyn, 201.

JE to the Countess of Sunderland, 23 December 1688, Letterbooks, ii, 879.

Sylva, which argued for forest planning and conservation, was preceded by Fumifugium; or the inconveniencie of the aer and smoak of London (1661), an influential attack on the city’s air pollution by ‘noxious’ industries. These texts have earned Evelyn a reputation for environmentalism, although the characterisation has been criticised (Gregory A Barton, ‘The Enlightenment Foundation of World Environmentalism’, Comparative Civilisations Review, 40:40, 1999, 18-19; Mark Jenner, ‘The Politics of London Air. John Evelyn's Fumifugium and the Restoration’, The Historical Journal, 38:3, 1995)

Darley, Evelyn, 204.

JE to Dr [Jeremy] Taylor, 27 April 1656, Letterbooks, i,171.

JE to Robert Boyle Esquire, 3 September 1659, Letterbooks i.253-7. JE to Samuel Hartlib Esquire, 4 February 1660, Letterbooks, i:275.

Claire Preston, The Poetics of Scientific Investigation in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 2015), 131.

Evelyn, Kalendarium, 429.

Harris, Transformations, 36. Evelyn was moved to Sussex at age five to live with his grandparents.

JE to Dr Browne of Norwich [Sir Thomas Browne], Letterbooks, i.271.

Harris, Transformations, 26; Evelyn, Kalendarium, 433.

Therese O’Malley, ‘Introduction’ to John Evelyn and the ‘Elysium Brittanicum’, Therese O’Malley and Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahan, eds. John Evelyn’s Elysium Brittanicum and European Gardening (Washington DC, 1993), 13; Alice T Friedman, ‘John Evelyn and English Architecture’, Ibid. 169; Rebecca Ann Michaels, ‘John Evelyn's Elysium Britannicum: Transplanting the Baroque Italian Garden to Restoration England’ (MA thesis, University of Victoria, 2004), 132-36.

Darley, Evelyn, 107.

Ibid; Harris, Transformations, 6.

Thomas à Kempis:. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1653/pg1653.html. In his Numismata (1697), 265, Evelyn expressed a wish that ‘at the first Reformation in this Kingdom, some of those demolished Religious Foundations had been spared both for Men and Women; where single Persons devoutly inclined, might have retired and lived without Reproach or insnaring Vows’.

John Evelyn, The History of Religion, ed Rev R M Evanson (London, 1850), 247-8.

Jeremy Taylor to JE, 16 April 1656, Reginald Heber, DD, The Right Reverend Jeremy Taylor DD, with a critical examination of his writings (1828), 51-52; JE to Jeremy Taylor, 27 April, 1656, Letterbooks, 1.170-1.

John Evelyn, A Devotionarie Book, ed Walter Frere (London, 1936), 40-1.

Mackenzie, Solitude, 51. For Evelyn’s devotional life see John Spurr, ‘A Sublime and Noble Service’, eds. Frances Harris and Michael Hunter, John Evelyn and His Milieu (London, 2003) 145-163, and his The Restoration Church in England, 1646-1689 (London, 1991) which briefly discusses the puritan elements in Evelyn’s Anglicanism as evident particularly in his relationship with Blagge Godolphin, 367.

Rev’d Dr Erica Longfellow, ‘Public, Private and the Household in early Seventeenth-Century England’, Journal of British Studies, 45:2 (2006), 319. See also Alec Ryrie, Being Protestant un Reformation Britain (Oxford, 2013), pp. 154–62.

Rev’d Dr Erica Longfellow, ‘Solitude and authenticity after the Reformation: or, Puritans out of the closet’, paper delivered to ‘Solitude, Religion and the Inner Voice’, a colloquium organised by the ‘Pathologies of Solitude’ project at Queen Mary University of London, 9 November 2019. I am grateful to Dr Longfellow for allowing me to cite her paper.

Dimitrj F. Bumazhnov, ‘Revolution of the Solitaries, Arsenius the Great, and Socrates. An Early Theological Justification of the Radical Monastic Detachment from Society, Philologia Classica, vol 15. Fasc 1, 2020.

Martin Luther, Letters of Spiritual Counsel, trans and ed by Theodore Trapper (Vancouver, 1960), pp 19, 84-7, 92-5, 117, 120. Jean Louis Quantin, ‘Paradoxes of Christian Solitude in the Seventeenth Century’, Journal of Early Modern Christianity, 1:2, 2014.

Richard Baxter, The Christians Converse with God (1693), https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A26896.0001.001?rgn=main;view=fulltext.

Jeremy Taylor, D D The Rules and Exercises of Holy Living (1650), (London, 1930), 27.

Evelyn, Publick, 192.

Ibid. 173-4.

Ibid. 190.

Evelyn attended semi-clandestine Book of Common Prayer services in the 1650s (Spurr, ‘Sublime and Noble Service’, 152).

Ibid, 146-7.

John Evelyn, A Devotionarie Book, ed Walter Frere (London, 1936), 8.

Evelyn, Publick, 189

Evelyn, Godolphin, 45.

Colin Burrow, ‘Tuesday Girl’ (review of Harris, Transformations), London Review of Books, 25:5, 6 March 2003.

Harris, Transformations, 47.

Harris, Transformations, 191.

93ibid., pp 48-49.

Mary Evelyn to Ralph Bohum, 12 April 1668. British Library Additional Manuscripts (hereafter BL Add MS] 78539.

Mary Evelyn was an extremely intelligent woman with a complex personal life who deserves fuller treatment than space permits here. She once told John that in acquiring Margaret as his soul mate, he had got himself ‘the greatest jewell in the world’. (Harris Transformations, 233). For more on Margaret’s relationship with Mary and the rest of the Evelyn family see below (X).

This has received little historical attention, with the notable exception of female religious recluses on whom there is a substantial, and growing, literature. But female secular solitude, at least in the English case, has been neglected. Webb’s Privacy and Solitude is a seminal study, as is Bending’s Green Retreats, but there is no equivalent work for the period examined in this article.

Seventeenth-century Englishwomen seeking a cloistered life sometimes moved to the continent: Claire Walker, Gender and Politics in Early Modern Europe: English Convents in France and the Low Countries (New York, 2003).

Bending, Green Retreats, 7.

Giovanni Francesco Loredano, The Life of Adam (1649), 23; quoted in Philip C Almond, Adam and Eve in Seventeenth-Century Thought (Cambridge, 1999), 188.

Evelyn, Publick, 194.

Ibid. 166.

Harris, Transformations, 66.

For Margaret’s biography, see Harris, Transformations; John Evelyn, The Life of Mrs Godolphin, ed Harriet Sampson (Oxford, 1939); W G Hiscock, John Evelyn and Mrs Godolphin (London, 1951) which Harris discusses critically: Transformations, 306-9.

Evelyn, Godolphin, 21.

Ibid. 17.

Richard Hooker, Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie (1594) (Amsterdam: Do Capo Press, 1971), 17-18; quoted in Cornelia Wilde, Friendship, Love and Letters. Ideals of Seraphic Friendship in Seventeenth-Century England (Heidelberg, 2012), 106-107.

JE to Robert Boyle, 1 October 1659, Letterbooks, i, 263.

Sara Heller Mendelson, The Mental World of Stuart Women (Amherst, 1987), 86.

JE to Mrs Boscawen, 23 March 1685, Letterbooks, ii, 761-762; JE to Sidney Godolphin, 20 March 1685, Letterbooks, ii, 759-760. For Margaret’s friendly relationship with John’s wife and children, see above (pX) and Harris, Transformations, 178-9, 233-4, 240-1, 260-2. Mary Evelyn’s feelings for Margaret cooled briefly at the height of John’s obsession with the younger woman but once Margaret had wed Sidney the friendship resumed, and became even warmer as the young bride turned to Mary for advice and support (Ibid. 185, 233-4.).

See n 93 for women who moved to continental nunneries. Anglican religious orders for women began to appear in England in the 1840s.

Evelyn, Life, p 64.

Bridget Hill, ‘A Refuge from Men: the Idea of a Protestant Nunnery’, Past and Present, 117 (1987), 110-1.

Evelyn, Numismata, 265.

Hill, ‘A Refuge’, 112.

Ibid.

Evelyn, Numismata, 265. For Masham’s objections see Jacqueline Broad, Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge 2003), 122-4.

Mary Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, for the Advancement of Their True and Greatest Interest, in Two Parts (1697), part two: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/54984/54984-h/54984-h.htm.

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, ‘The Female Academy’, Playes (1662), 659. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A53060.0001.001/1:43.3.4?rgn=div3;view=fulltext

BL Add MS 79501, fos. 97, 98.

Evelyn, Godolphin, 30.

Ibid. 20.

Ibid. 22.

Harris, Transformations, 150-157. ‘Seraphic’ platonic relationships between the sexes have a long history in Christianity: see Patrick Collinson, ‘”Not Sexual in the Ordinary Sense”: Men, Women, and Religious Transactions’, Elizabethan Essays (London, 1994), 119-50; Wilde, Friendship. For the Renaissance transformation of the homoeroticism of Plato’s love philosophy into the ideal of a chaste, spiritually uplifting love between the sexes, see Jill Kraye, ‘The Transformation of Platonic Love in the Italian Renaissance’, in Anna Baldwin and Sarah Hutton, eds, Platonism in the English Imagination (Cambridge, 2009). The influence of the Neoplatonist Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) and his many followers - who held that the perceptions of the senses were less real than the representations of the imagination (‘fancy’), and that the desires aroused by bodily beauty were less powerful, and far inferior, to love of the divine - played a central role.

Harris, Transformations, 78.

‘Electra’ is a star in the Pleiades cluster’; in Greek mythology it’s the third of the celestial ‘Seven Sisters’. Evelyn uses it to signify Blagge Godolphin’s heavenly piety (Harris, Transformations, 154-6; Wilde, Friendship, 184-5).

Ibid. 152; Evelyn, Godolphin, 23-4.

Harris, Transformations, 9.

John Evelyn, ‘Oeconomics to a Newly Married Friend’ (1676), BL Add MS 78386.fo.6r.

Harris, Transformations, 151; Margaret Blagge [hereafter MB] to JE, 11 May 1673, BL Add MS 78307, fo.13v; MB to JE, July 1675, W G Hiscock, Evelyn and His Family Circle (London, 1955), 101.

Hiscock, Evelyn and Godolphin, 99.

Evelyn, Godolphin, 14.

Ibid. 86, xxi; Hiscock, Evelyn and Godolphin, 151-2.

Evelyn, Godolphin, 101-5.

Margaret Blagge, ‘Devotional Papers’, Add Ms 78392, fo.3

JE to MB, 1674. Add Ms 78392. fo.3

Hiscock, Evelyn and Godolphin, 75.

Evelyn, Devotionarie, 13.

Hiscock, Evelyn and Godolphin, 75

MB to JE, 2 July 1673, Add. MS 78307 fo. 19v

JE to MB, March 1673, BL Add MS 78307 fo.10

Burrow, ‘Tuesday Girl’, LRB, 6 March 2003.

Harris, Transformations, 8.

Evelyn, Devotionarie, 59; Hiscock, Evelyn and Godolphin, 44.

E, Devotionarie, 40, 43.

Taylor, Holy Living, 183.

Ibid. 71, 75.

Erica Longfellow, ‘”My now solitary prayers”: Eikon basilike and Changing Attitudes toward Religious Solitude’, eds. Jessica Martin and Alec Ryrie, Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern England (London, 2012), 60.

Evelyn, Devotionarie, 56.

Mackenzie, Solitude, 82-3.

Evelyn, Publick, 191, 194.

Harris, Transformations, 295.

John Evelyn, Diary, ed. Guy de la Bédoyère (Woodbridge, 1995), 281.

JE to Robert Boyle, 1 October 1659, Letterbooks, i,260-64.

Evelyn, Godolphin, 23-4.

MB to JE, 16 October 1673, BL Add MS 78392

Harris, Transformations, 289.

Evelyn, Godolphin, 41-2.

Ibid. 27, 48, 82, 89. Margaret’s symptoms conformed to those described as religious melancholy in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (Burton, Anatomy, Third Partition, 311-42). The authority on early modern religious melancholy is Angus Gowland whose new edition of Burton’s Anatomy (London, 2021) is superb; see also his The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy: Robert Burton in Context (Cambridge, 2006), 69-70, 139-204.

MB to JE, May 1673, BL Add MS 78307, fo.13v; Hiscock, Evelyn and Godolphin, 111.

JE to MB, March 1673, BL Add. MS 78307 fo.10; Evelyn, Godolphin, 39-52, 60. Harris, Transformations, 209-212.

JE to MB, 27 February 1673, BL Add MS 78307, fos. 8-9; Evelyn, Godolphin, 45-46.

MB to JE, 26 June 1674, BL Add MS 78307, fo. 41.

Evelyn, Godolphin, 74; MB to JE, 1678, BL Add MS 78307, fo. 94.

Evelyn, Godolphin, 79-80.

Evelyn, Diary, 224.

JE to Sidney Godolphin, 9 Sept 1679. BL Add MS 78307

JE to Sidney Godolphin, Feb 1679, BL Add MS 78298

Evelyn, Publick, 246; Evelyn, Godolphin, 6.