The Manor

by Mac Griswold

  Despite the lack of evidence, and our predisposition to frame these women in very pragmatic terms, is it possible that some of them felt a flash of excitement or admiration, however brief, for the spectacle that unrolled around them? I want to ask if there was room or time enough for Grizzell to be amazed and delighted in the New World, given the intellectual climate of her English youth and her background as a young gentlewoman.

  Whether the ultimate spiritual quest that led Grizzell to the Society of Friends began with her hearing family discussions about religion, philosophy, or the new science is a highly speculative question. Certainly two of her brothers, Thomas and Francis, were intellectuals. The younger, Thomas, became a Cambridge don and part of a circle that explored the far reaches of mysticism and inward spiritual experience. When Thomas died in 1672 he left his books, which included some of the most extreme writings of the period on religion, politics, and social protest, to his older brother. Francis, four years older than Grizzell, left England at the same time she did, moved to Rhode Island, and created one of the largest libraries in America at the time. His 217 books, according to a list he compiled when he was eighty-one years old, included works on the law, literature, travel, science, and medicine. Francis Brinley kept his brother’s incendiary books even though, as a staunch conservative, his own opinions, expressed in action, print, and personal correspondence, ran absolutely counter to their contents. He clearly wanted to know all sides of every question. His lifelong reading habits reveal a humanist searching everywhere for “the capacities of human reason to grasp the patterns of nature and the requirements for a flourishing life for both the body and the soul.”

  Grizzell, like Nathaniel in Amsterdam, thus grew up in a family where readers and knowledge were valued. As a grown woman, she possessed her own Bible, so we know she was literate. Although the exercise of female intellect was generally regarded askance as Eve’s “fatal curiosity,” a woman could freely indulge in reading popular garden manuals, a relatively new literary genre only steps away from the natural histories and travel accounts and topographies that were just beginning to emerge in print. Books such as William Lawson’s The Countrie House-Wife’s Garden dealt with more than the practical science of growing plants and the art of laying out beds and paths in Clerkenwell—or anywhere. “Far from being tedious prescriptions, the early English gardening books were full of dreams of nature—and men’s dreams for themselves,” writes the historian Rebecca Bushnell.

  The sensuality in the fiercely sexy poetry of Donne and Marvell also permeated ordinary garden manuals, though the language was more decorous. Inevitably, Nature, with a capital N, was cast as a woman. The herbalist John Gerard rhapsodized over the pleasures of a queenly virgin earth “apparelled with plants, as with a robe of embroidered worke, set with orient pearles, and garnished with great diversitie of rare and costly jewels [in a] varietie and perfection of colours,” even as he ardently also stressed that the intellectual pleasures of gardening led to a deeper knowledge of the Creator. Grizzell, as a girl entering womanhood, would have grasped that such power and beauty were also to be hers, however humbly she was meant to accept them as God’s gift.

  Tradescant’s Ark

  Grizzell’s childhood London contained the loveliest, most accessible, and liveliest proof of the mix of old magic with the new scientific observation: “Tradescant’s Ark,” in South Lambeth, London, so nicknamed because it aimed to gather all creation under one roof. It opened as England’s first public natural history museum, Tradescant’s Rarities, in 1631 and quickly became a regular city sight for visitors and London citizens alike, along with the royal armory, the wild beasts of the Tower of London menagerie, criminal executions and hangings, and the tombs of Westminster Abbey. (Westminster Abbey’s cloisters housed the offices of the Exchequer where Thomas Brinley worked.) One prominent pedagogue praised London as the best place “for the full improvement of children in their education, because of the variety of objects which daily present themselves to them, or may easily be seen once a year, by walking to Mr. John Tradescant’s, or the like houses or gardens, where rarities are kept.” By the early 1640s, Grizzell, then six, was old enough to visit the Ark on an outing, like any other young Londoner with enlightened, well-off parents. Getting there was not difficult: there were abundant light craft to hire on the Thames, operating out of the many water stairs between Whitehall and London Bridge, where Grizzell might have hopped aboard.

  Tradescant’s rarities combined a Wunderkammer (a cabinet, or chamber, of natural and artificial wonders) with a botanical institute and trial garden. A sixpence admission charge let visitors gaze at hundreds of exhibits indoors and out. While every Wunderkammer was meant to show off the power of knowledge and the miracles of God’s creation, the John Tradescants, father and son, were also intent on studying the cultural world in microcosm through each object they gathered, just as empirical scientists investigated the natural world with their new instruments—microscopes and telescopes.

  The Scythian lamb, Cibotium borametz, grew on a stalk and grazed only in the fabulous pages of travel and natural history books. (From Henry Lee’s The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary [London, 1887], after Claude Duret [1605])

  I imagine Grizzell walked through the pair of bleached whale ribs, towering white and high over the moated entrance, then into the courtyard where she passed “a very ingenious little boat of bark”—perhaps an American Indian canoe. Indoors, walls were hung to the ceiling with “rarities” of all sorts, spears, bows, arrows, shields, little boats and paddles, tacked up next to the domed shells of giant sea turtles, snake skins, and grinning desiccated alligators. Other walls were papered with paintings. Every flat surface was crammed with ostrich eggs, medals, coins, antiquities, natural malformations, fossils, statues, crystals, beautiful scientific instruments, and intricate chiming mechanical toys. The Ark’s 1656 catalogue matter-of-factly listed a piece of the skin of a borametz, Agnus scythicus, the stalk-bound vegetable lamb!

  “Pohatan, King of Virginia”

  After gawking at a dragon’s egg, a mermaid’s hand, and a fragment of the True Cross, Grizzell would have found her way to a large brown cloak: “the robe of the king of Virginia.” (Today, as the single most famous object to survive from the Tradescants’ collections, the “robe” is exhibited with other remnants of their hoard in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.)

  By the 1640s Virginia was a known quantity to Londoners. They eagerly consumed travelers’ information about Native Americans and their exotic ways. When Captain John Smith met Powhatan, Smith was impressed by his noble bearing, “proudly lying uppon a Bedstead [with] such a grave and Majesticall countenance, as drave me into admiration to see such state in a naked Salvage.” As the historian Karen Kupperman writes, Smith admired him, and the werowances, or kinsmen and leaders who owed Powhatan allegiance, “in part because he could not trust them. He saw their alternating friendliness and hostility as evidence of policy and as part of their toughness.” (The Sylvesters’ neighbor, Lion Gardiner, expressed similar wary admiration for the Indians of New England.)

  Whether the cloak belonged to Powhatan is debatable, as it is unclear who brought it to the Ark. Some even think of it as a wall hanging rather than a garment. But whoever its owner was, and whatever its purpose, this southern Algonquian treasure is what Smith saw in Virginia and described as “large mantels of Deare skin … Some imbrodered with white beads,” made from local shells and worn by “the better sort.” About seven and a half feet long and five feet wide, the mantle is the right size for a six-footer (Smith described Powhatan as “a tall well proportioned man, with a sower looke, his head somewhat gray … His age near 60; of a very able and hardy body to endure any labour”).

  The Tradescant robe consists of four tanned deerskins stitched together with sinew, which is also used to attach the beads. Some of the beads have fallen off, but the design is clearly visible. The figure of a man flanked by a deer and a wolf stands dead center, facing the viewer. Sch
olars have identified the Indian as a major chief, probably Powhatan, and other parts of the design as a map of Tidewater Indian communities. The clue to a probable Powhatan connection lies in the thirty-four small beaded roundels surrounding the central figure. Each circle may represent a district under the chief’s command. Sure enough, in his Historie of Travell into Virginia Britania (1612), William Strachey, secretary of the Virginia Company in 1609, wrote that Powhatan’s “petty Weroances in all, may be in nomber, about three or fower and thirty.”

  Even if Grizzell viewed the deerskin cloak only as barbaric raiment, she would nevertheless have grasped that its mysterious figures and circlets had something to do with kingly power, just as those who admired the Duke of Buckingham’s diamond buttons could read their social meaning. She was surrounded by British royal iconography. The deliberate “branding” of Queen Elizabeth I, for instance, had generated hundreds of images of the monarch in print, paint, and embroidery, and on coins and fabric. It’s an easy jump to the worlds of power and beauty embroidered on the Virginia chieftain’s cloak—or to the regalia that Wyandanch, the Montauket leader, and his followers wore when they came to Shelter Island in 1658 for a ceremonial meeting with Nathaniel.

  Other coats, of feathers and bear and raccoon skins, hung in the museum, along with “Black Indian girdles made of Wampum peek, the best sort,” six sorts of “tamahacks … Virginian purses imbroidered with Roanoke,” and a stuffed “black bird with red shoulders and pinions,” the natty red-winged blackbird that arrives every spring on Shelter Island and sings its sweet, piercing song as it swings on a cattail in the marsh.

  The garden around the museum teemed with living discoveries. The two John Tradescants, father and son, were first and foremost plantsmen; by the time Grizzell would have visited in the 1640s, they had amassed an astounding collection. As gardener at the royal palace of Oatlands, John the Elder had hunted specimens obsessively for himself and his powerful patron. From the New World, North American plants poured into his three-acre trial plots. John the younger, who followed in his father’s footsteps at Oatlands, brought back additional hundreds of American species from his three trips to Virginia.

  When Grizzell wandered the paths of the Ark’s garden, she would have observed American flowers she later came to know more intimately. Alabaster-pale Sanguinaria canadensis, the ghost flower of March or April, named bloodroot for the gory juice that drips from every broken stem, probably existed in South Lambeth as only a clump or two; in the New World it spreads in thousands of blossoms, whitening the black woodland leaf mold. By the late 1640s the Tradescants’ single tulip poplar (Liriodendron tulipifera) had probably reached twenty feet and borne a few flowers, a contrast to the mottled trunks of tulip poplars on their native soil, which soar 150 feet, their branches lit from top to bottom in May with small, deep cups of greenish yellow. The red trumpets of American honeysuckle (Lonicera sempervirens), which decorously climbed a wall or trellis next to the Tradescants’ English roses, would have greeted Grizzell’s first American July by raging through sunny woodland edges like a summer firestorm.

  Given the seventeenth-century conviction that certain plants were always ready to jump the barrier from vegetal to animal species, Grizzell had good reason to scrutinize some of the odder American plants in the Tradescants’ garden. Autumn visitors to the Ark beheld the gaunt, scraggly form of a fast-growing staghorn sumac (Rhus typhina) holding up thick, flushed drupes packed into pyramidal “candles.” Coming across sumac in its native habitat, it is impossible to resist running a hand over its clublike branches, shaped like a young buck’s antlers and clad just like them in a dense, alluring reddish-brown velvet. When the temperature drops suddenly in the evening, a branch clothed in that soft fur still feels warm to the touch, like a human hand or arm. At the edges of forest clearings, in natural meadows and especially in sandy soil, staghorn sumac colonizes quickly, its flat-topped tribes growing to twenty-five feet and spreading even wider.

  The rarities of South Lambeth would become the stuff of everyday life during Grizzell’s more than thirty years on Shelter Island. No doubt her take on the Manhansetts who lived and worked within the Sylvesters’ domestic compound would alter drastically over the decades, as familiarity eroded her wonder and curiosity and as the English ceased to respect the local Indians or to depend on them as needed allies.

  In reviewing what Grizzell was exposed to in her early life, we can ask if she shared the inquisitive spirit of her times. The age was afire with willingness to explore the unknown, whether an entire continent or the unlimited interior reaches of the human head and heart. Brought up to expect a settled English life, Grizzell would be forced by the events of the Civil War to become an economic refugee in America and to set out on a dangerous and often lonely adventure, an adventure in which all she had learned, absorbed, or breathed in her young life that had helped her to read the world and trust her powers would come in handy to read a new language of signs.

  7

  THE WORLD TURNS UPSIDE DOWN

  I’m back at the manor. My footsteps echo off the clay tiles as I approach the vault’s only source of light, a rickety floor lamp. Large leather-bound albums hold the most important documents, unfolded and pressed flat by Andy Fiske in the course of his many years of effort. The heavy covers of one album are lined with lead. Page one. The will of Grizzell Sylvester, the only document in which she tells us directly about herself, so we must read backward from it to find out about her. A sheet of finely ribbed paper folded in quarters to make four pages, it was written on May 7, 1685, when Grizzell was forty-nine years old. Two of her brothers, Francis and William, were among the executors; her witnesses included two of her five sons. Scanning the regular lines of the clerk’s handwriting, I find standard phrases that to Grizzell were more than the formulas they typically are today. She defined herself first and foremost, as did all seventeenth-century Europeans, by her religious beliefs. Pay dirt for me is on the last page, where she signed her name in the small, well-formed script she had learned in England as a child: Grizzell Sylvester.

  In calling her Grizzell, her parents honored a distant cousin, reusing the name after their first Grizzell died soon after birth in 1631. (Baptizing another baby with a treasured family name was a frequent practice when infant mortality was high.) The name originated in a popular fairy tale: Patient Griselda, a Cinderella in reverse, was the poor, virtuous, and beautiful heroine whose cruel princely husband tested her fortitude by kidnapping their children, telling her they were dead, exiling her to her peasant cottage, and threatening to marry her sister, or, in another version, their own daughter. Grizzell’s name must have taught her, as well as generations of other little girls, about the passive virtues of composure, self-discipline, and resilience—as well as godly acceptance of the unexpected.

  Grizzell’s signature on her will is as legible and well-formed as the handwriting of the official copyist who took down her last wishes. Two of her sons, Nathaniel II and Peter, acted as witnesses.

  The modest firmness of Grizzell’s signature contrasts with her tumultuous last years in England. Nathaniel’s roots in striving entrepreneurial Amsterdam and his crucible relationship with plantation slavery shaped Sylvester Manor. Grizzell’s early adolescence was spent in the bloody uproar of the English Civil War. She saw the end of her father’s career and endured the loss of family stability. So far as we can tell, the threats of war, loss, and uncertainty appear to have made her resourceful and steady. Within the demands and restraints set out for a seventeenth-century woman, she would fashion a life for herself and her household on Shelter Island very different from that of most of her female New England colonists, who lived next door to each other in close, supportive communities.

  The Royal Route to Civil War

  King Charles I and his people struggled with each other for twenty-four years. Between 1625, when he was crowned, and 1649, “the people,” as represented by Parliament, denied the king many powers—governmental, fiduciar
y, and military—that he considered royal prerogatives. He fought back.

  An increasing number of his subjects were alienated from the Church of England after the king appointed William Laud as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633. With the king’s encouragement, Laud strengthened episcopal powers and used the secret proceedings of the Star Chamber to harry Puritans, who fled abroad (hence the pamphlet war waged by clerics such as Amsterdam’s John Canne, Nathaniel’s pastor). Laud also reintroduced as High Anglican practices the lace-cassock-and-incense rituals that had been banned with Catholicism at the Reformation. Public fears that the nation was headed back to the Roman Church had already been aroused by the king’s marriage in 1625 to the French royal princess, Henrietta Maria, a devout Catholic.

  By 1636, the year of Grizzell’s birth, England was seven years into the so-called Eleven-Year Tyranny, also known as King Charles’s Personal Rule, during which the monarch governed by executive privilege, refusing to summon Parliament after a catastrophic session in 1629 when most of his requests for subsidies were questioned, denied, cut back, or grudgingly granted. The cash-strapped king partially solved the ensuing credit crisis by pawning the crown jewels, by squeezing the country with demands for money unauthorized by Parliament (promptly condemned as taxation without representation), and by the sale of royal lands. He waged underfunded, unsuccessful, and therefore unpopular wars led by his favorite, the first Duke of Buckingham, against Spain and France, and against the Scots in 1640.