Eleanor Glanville 17thC Entomologist

by Deborah Swift

Eleanor Glanville, born in 1654, was a 17th century entomologist who lived in Lincolnshire, and later Somerset. She is renowned for collecting many butterfly specimens, many of which are the earliest specimens kept in the British Museum. The Glanville Fritillary (Melitaea cinxia) was named after her.

The Glanville Fritillary

This fly took its name from the ingenious Lady Glanvil, 

whose memory had like to have suffered for her curiosity 

Moses Harris 1776

In fact, although referred to as `Lady Glanville', Eleanor actually bore no title, the honorary title of `Lady` was bestowed upon her simply because she was a gentlewoman. But the honorific stuck, and she is still called by that in documents about the study of butterflies.

Eleanor was the elder of the two daughters of Major William Goodricke (d. 1666) and his wife, also called Eleanor. On his death, her father left a thousand pounds to Mary, his younger daughter, but to Eleanor he left his estate, which included Tickenham Court in Somerset, a medieval hall dating back to 1200, and there she took up residence. Her wealth made her an attractive marriage proposition, so on 14th April 1676 she married Edmund Ashfield, an artist from Lincolnshire, with whom she had three children, Forest, a boy, and twin girls Mary and Katherine, who unfortunately died at birth.

Tickenham Court

Unfortunately her artist husband died in 1690, and she was soon sought out by Richard Glanville. This time Eleanor was unlucky in love, for Glanville turned out to be a violent bully, who more than once threatened to shoot her dead. The marriage was such a disaster that they became estranged in 1698, with Glanville angling to get his hands on her estates the whole while.

It was then that Eleanor began to take solace in the natural world and renew her love for butterflies.

Petiver illustration of butterflies

She corresponded regularly with James Petiver (1660–1718), a London pharmacist who was at that time a well-known naturalist and insect collector. He was the man who first coined the name “fritillary”, after the Latin word fritillus - a chequered dice box, and was the first man to give butterflies their English names, such as Admiral, Tortoishell and Brimstone. She also had long association with Joseph Dandridge, a silk-screen printer and owner of one of the finest butterfly collections of the time, and also the botanist Adam Buddle, an Essex rector from whom we get the flower name Buddleia. After Petiver's death his collection was purchased by Hans Sloan, and from there it made its way to the British Museum (Natural History Museum).

For Eleanor, collecting insects became a complete obsession - so much so that she often paid her servants 6d or a shilling (good money in those days) to net butterflies and collect specimens for her. She also gave them lessons on how to carry them safely and how to pack them in brown paper to send them off to Petiver. Petiver documented many of Eleanor’s specimens and her first-hand observations in compiling his ‘Gazophylacium naturae artis’, an illustrated catalogue of British insects.

from the Petiver Collection

When she went to London in 1703 taking with her a large collection of butterflies, her visit caused some excitement among naturalists in the capital.

Whilst this was going on, her husband Glanville was intent only on securing his ownership of her property and cared nothing for her as a person. Glanville also organised a plot to kidnap one of her sons, Richard, from Aldersgate where he was apprenticed to Petiver. He wanted to blackmail him into rescinding any claim against the property that he stood to inherit upon Eleanor's death. With the violent Glanville, Eleanor had two more surviving children, Richard (b. 1687) and Eleanor (b. 1688). but because of the erratic behaviour of her estranged husband, she separated from him completely in 1698.

Fearing he would take her inheritance after her death, she arranged for her estate to be dealt with by a board of trustees should she die, and she bequeathed her estate to her second cousin Sir Henry Goodricke, except for some small legacies to her children.

Eleanor Glanville died in 1709 at Tickenham Court, but Glanville had turned her son, Forest, against her, and the battle for her inheritance still was not over. When her will was published, and he found she had left everything to a second cousin, her eldest son, Forest Glanville sought to contest it on the grounds that his mother had gone mad.

Some relations that was disappointed by her Will, attempted to let it aside by Acts of Lunacy, for they suggested that none but those who were deprived of their senses, would go in Pursuit of butterflies.
Moses Harris

Unfortunately the ploy worked, and in 1712 he won his case. Forest then sold off his mother's home, the Manor at Tickenham.

It seems unusual to us that someone could be considered mad merely for hunting butterflies, however, in this period in history, shortly after the English Civil Wars, women who embraced the natural world with too much enthusiasm were still accused of witchcraft. In the seventeenth century entomology was largely limited to the study of useful insects like bees and silkworms. Butterflies, according to popular belief, could be witches or spirits in disguise, out to curdle cream and butter, hence their name “buttervögel” in German and “butterfly” in English. No doubt Eleanor would have heard of, or even witnessed, women who were hanged for similar harmless occupations. Her neighbours claimed incredulously that she beat the hedges for a parcel of wormes, thinking this crazy, but of course they were only the caterpillars she was studying. Nature Study, for a seventeenth century woman, was a very dangerous occupation.

Mr Rae defended her character. This last gentleman went to Exeter, and on the trial satisfied the judge and jury of the lady's laudable inquiry into the wonderful works of Creation, and established her will." 
Moses Harris

Her other son Richard seemed to have remained loyal too, for he is quoted on record as saying he had the best of mothers and the worst of fathers.

Illustration by Maria Sybilla Merian

I wonder if Eleanor Glanville ever heard of Maria Sibylla Merian, a butterfly illustrator who published her book, Caterpillars, Their Wonderous Transformations and Peculiar Nourishment from Flowers in 1679.  Not only was Merian a woman who would have understood completely Eleanor's passion, but she was another woman in the male-dominated field of science. Read my post on Merian here.

Once widespread on open grassland in England, Eleanor's Glanville Fritillary (Melitaea cinxia) is now one of Britain’s rarest butterflies. It is rare because it lives only on ribwort plantain (Plantago lanceolata) and because the caterpillars need the warmth of direct sun on bare ground. Such sites are now rare in England.

Fiona Mountain has written a delighful novel, Lady of the Butterflies which fictionalises Eleanor's life. Do give it a look. And why not listen this beautiful zither tune composed especially to honour Eleanor Glanville's life.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Deborah Swift is the author of seven books, most set in the 17th century. Her first novel has just been re-released with a new cover, and tells the story of another seventeenth century woman, contemporary with Eleanor, who was also obsessed by nature.

Find Deborah on Twitter @swiftstory and on her blog www.deborahswift.com

Limning - The Art of the Tudor Miniature

by Deborah Swift

Limning is a thing apart from all other painting or drawing, and it excelleth all other painting whatsoever in sundry points...

 -- Nicholas Hilliard

'Limning' was the contemporary term in Tudor and Stuart times for miniature paintings, portraits which were portable and could be held in the hand. In the days before photography, these likenesses were much prized, and the making of them was considered to be a specialised art, apart from general portrait painting with its own skills and techniques. Many of these special techniques stemmed from those used in medieval manuscript illumination.

Miniatures were designed to be worn as pieces of jewellery too and were kept protected in delicate cases of gold or ivory, or stored in cabinets of rare imported woods. Most limners were also jewellers, as was the case with Nicholas Hilliard, probably England's best known limner.

The painting was done on vellum, the skin of an unborn calf, which is hairless and made the fine surface needed for such small work. It was then backed onto card -- often a playing card to give enough rigidity. Dry colours were bought from the apothecary and mixed with a binder in mussel shells. The brush - then known as a pencil - was made from one or two squirrel hairs.

The elaborate clothing in court portraits as in the one of Elizabeth I, above, was brought separately to the studio so that Hilliard could paint the detail without tiring the sitter. This portrait, somewhat idealized, was painted when Elizabeth was in middle age.

Real gold and silver were applied with gum arabic and burnished using an animal tooth set into a handle. To give the crisp effect of lace a more solid white pigment was dribbled painstakingly into its intricate pattern to leave a slightly raised effect. An even heavier paint was used to make raised droplets of "pearls". The sitters often appear paler than they would have when the painting was new because the Red Lake pigment fades in the light.

In Hilliard's Treatise concerning the Arte of Limning he tells us he is extremely fussy about cleanliness, and will not allow coal fires to burn where he is working, lest soot should fall on his work. Even more he urges those who wish to paint miniatures to wear only silk so that particles of lint and fibre might not fall on the work from their sleeves.

This portrait (above) by Hilliard was identified as Mary, Queen of Scots, in the 18th century, although there is still some dispute.

The inscription 'Virtutis Amore' is an anagram of the name 'Marie Stouart.' The style and costume indicate it was actually made after her death as a memorial portrait following her execution in 1587.

I love the transparency of her veiling and the way Hilliard has treated all the different shades of white. I imagine it must have been very difficult to paint something so detailed after the sitter is dead - not to mention spooky!

Miniatures were often given as love tokens or signs of political loyalty. Some portraits have a hidden symbolic meaning that has been lost to us, such as this young man against a background of flames, holding a portrait of a lady. Perhaps he was indicating a flaming passion, or perhaps survival from a catastrophic event.



The art of limning was passed down from master to apprentice. Hilliard was first apprenticed to Robert Brandon, a Goldsmith in Westcheap at the Sign of the Gilt Lion and Firebrand. (What a great name!)

In his turn Hilliard employed Isaac Oliver as his apprentice, and he also became very fashionable in Court circles, almost ousting his master. Isaac Oliver's family were Huguenots and fled France to escape religious persecution. He became known for his realistic treatment of children and his slightly less formal portraiture. Below you can see delightful portraits of two Elizabethan girls.



In The Lady's Slipper, Alice's father encourages her to take up miniature painting. Alice finds the techniques and scale of the work too exacting and decides instead to study botanical painting. However, I loved looking into the art of the miniature and really came to appreciate the skill involved in these small jewel-like portraits. Pictures are all courtesy of the V&A museum.

This post was first published on my blog in 2011 but it didn't get many viewers so I hope you will forgive me if I give it a second airing. And here are my books which I think have beautiful covers, designed by the team at Macmillan. These days books have to look good in miniature too, as icons we can view online, so the art of the miniature is not dead after all!

www.deborahswift.com

17th Century Garden Design for Women

by Deborah Swift

William Lawson is credited with making gardening popular for women, with his book, A New Orchard and Garden which was printed together with the first horticultural book written solely for women, The Country Housewife's Garden. Beautifully illustrated with charming woodcuts, it tells the 17th century woman everything she needs to know to have a productive and visually attractive garden.

The concept of a "pretty" garden would have been an anathema to most women of the 17th century, as gardens were primarily about producing food and herbs, unless you were very wealthy, in which case the gardening was left to your servants. The 17-century  author of The English Housewife, Gervase Markham, claimed the “complete woman” had

“skill in physic, surgery, cookery, extraction of oils, banqueting stuff, ordering of great feasts, preserving of all sorts of wines…distillations, perfumes, ordering of wool, hemp and flax: making cloth and dying; the knowledge of dairies: office of malting; of oats…of brewing, baking, and all other things belonging to a household.” 

Guess that did not leave much time for planting pretty flowers!

Because kitchen gardens were about supplying the table, and as much ground as possible was covered with edible plants, every garden was different, planted according to the whims of the women of the household. William Lawson's book for the country housewife was designed to be read in conjunction with his New Orchard and Garden, thus giving women access to the idea of garden design, in print, for the very first time.

William Lawson lived from 1553 to1635 and was the vicar of Ormesby, a country parish in Yorkshire. No doubt his gardening passion led him to be so long-lived for an age where most people did not reach fifty. Gardening was a national passion in the 16th and 17th centuries, as more species came from abroad, and an interest in subjects concentrating on the useful qualities and medical virtues of plants became popular.

But the war against garden pests was just as hard then as now - he calls them  the 'whole Army of mischiefs' and says that 'Good things have most enemies' . The enemies in his Yorkshire Garden were apparently deer and moles.

Lawson's garden plan included long walkways, a maze, and even a bowling alley.The illustration below depicts the overall plan.

Its rectangular shape is split into six  sections  over three  terraces, with flights of stairs and paths to go from one to the other. Its design demonstrates the vogue in the 16th and 17th century for symmetry and patterns. In the top left square he planned to have topiary, signified by the man with the sword and a horse. A river runs at the top and bottom of the garden where he says 'you might sit in your mount and angle a peckled trout, sleighty eel or some other daintie fish'.



In The Lady's Slipper, Alice Ibbetson is an obsessive gardener - a pioneer if you like, testing out the knowledge handed down from her father who was a plantsman much like William Lawson. She finds relaxation in communing with nature. Her maid, Ella, featured in The Gilded Lily, would try to avoid garden work if at all possible. Her sights are set on becoming a fine lady, just like Alice Ibbetson, and leaving manual labour behind for good.

More information from my blogs
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Thanks for reading!

Why I write historical fiction - Deborah Swift

A few years ago I would have been surprised to find I had produced a historical novel. So why write one?
Before I came to write The Lady's Slipper, most of my writing was contemporary. I read a lot of contemporary fiction, and was a member of a book group that read mostly literary fiction.So what won me over to writing historicals?

The answer is that it wasn't a case of me deciding on a period and then setting the novel there, it was more that my characters demanded certain conditions to flourish and tell their story. I started with a character who wanted to paint an orchid - I had seen the rare lady's-slipper orchid myself and wanted to write (initially) a poem about it. This desire was subverted into my character's desire to capture it in paint. From then on the character grew and developed. I thought for the flower to have impact I needed a time when ideas about botany and images of flowers were new and fresh. Perhaps a time before mass printing, a time when herbs and flowers were used for healing. This led me to the 17th century when herbalists such as Nicolas Culpeper were just making their mark on history and the science of botany was in its infancy.

The idea of the medicinal use of the lady's-slipper then sparked the character of Margaret the herbalist, whose views on "the web of the world" were a very different religion from the conformist view of the time, and would probably be pigeon-holed as 'pagan' today. I have always been interested in the different ways that faiths have shaped the world and this tied in nicely with the burgeoning Quaker movement, viewed in the 17th century as radical and dangerous. I couldn't resist having a Quaker character, so Richard Wheeler  - the soldier turned quaker - was born. In addition, the Quaker movement started close to my home, and visits to the still surviving 17th century historical sites fascinated me.

My creative writing class were always telling me that conflict drives a novel so I was also keen to exploit enmity between the Quakers and the ruling class, and to create an atmosphere of unease. The English Civil War where the King had been beheaded by his own people supplied the background disturbance I needed.So my first book's period grew from the desire to find a setting for my characters and not the other way round. The setting has a function to allow me to explore certain ideas and let them flourish to the maximum effect.

The book I am just finishing now and which is about to land on my agents and editors desk - tomorrow if I can get it done, is set in a different period, which has difficulties in that it involved a whole new area of research in a whole new country. As with the first two I was looking for a time and place where my characters and ideas would collide in the most satisfying way and that led me to turn of the 17th century in Seville, with its clash of Islamic and Iberian cultures, the threat of the Inquisition, and its reputation for swordsmanship and bravado.So I'm afraid my characters had to be taken away from their usual English comfort, the drizzle and the cold, and into the heat, dust and passion of Spain.

17th century Seville

My second book, The Gilded Lily (out later in the year) is set in England through necessity as it features Ella, one of the characters from The Lady's Slipper. It is a very different book though as it is set in Restoration London, a choice made so that I could exploit the desire for wealth and luxury which is a part of Ella's character. Ella is considered beautiful and her sister Sadie, plain, so I needed an environment where the attitudes to beauty would be able to feature heavily in the plot. How would the two girls fortunes differ because of their difference in appearance? The period of the Restoration is perfect because after the monarchy returned everyone was obsessed with fashion and glamour, and the theatricality and artificiality of this led me to be able to explore the idea of storytelling, how the girls re-invented themselves, and how we all shape our own stories.

In all my books I start with the characters and then find the way to give them maximum rein through the setting. I used to be a scenographer so I draw on my experience of how a theatre setting can interact with the action in my writing. I choose history because I can examine contemporary ideas as if in a mirror. I am sure many other writers do the same, and would be really interested to hear what the process is like for them. I find I enjoy the researching part of writing enormously, and the wonderful excuse it gives me to hang around museums, historic houses, art galleries and libraries. And I have had to catch up quickly with my reading of historicals. I've discovered some fantastic writers in the  genre, who have given me further insights into our rich heritage, and  so I cannot imagine that I will run out of ideas from the wealth of our history, and I guess that will keep me writing historical fiction for a while yet!

You can find out more about my writing on my blog

www.deborahswift.blogspot.com

Thanks for reading!

Giveaway by Deborah Swift

This week's giveaway is The Lady's Slipper, by Deborah Swift. Please visit the Giveaway page to read about the book, and then return here to enter by comment. Be sure to leave contact information so that we can reach you if you are the winner!

The contest is open worldwide for a UK paperback.