Bettisfield, Maelor South, Wales

BETTISFIELD VILLAGE WEB

Bettisfield in the 1600’s

Sir Thomas Hanmer of Bettisfield          

Whose Garden Book, a small masterpiece of garden literature lay forgotten for 300 years.

By Patricia Cleveland Peck

 

       Sir Thomas Hanmer (1612-1678)  was a staunch Royalist and his  comprehensive collection of plants was amassed and cultivated at Bettisfield, his estate in Flintshire, during the Interregnum, a period when as a Cavalier, he found it politically prudent to stay far from London and keep a low profile.   For Hanmer lived through years fraught with political conflict.  He came from a distinguished family descended from Welsh Kings and although his father was a leader of the Puritan party, at the age of twelve he became a cup bearer at the Court of Charles I and before he was nineteen he had married the beautiful heiress Mistress Elizabeth Baker, one of Queen Henrietta Maria’s Maids of Honour.                                                                                          

When in 1629,  Charles I dismissed Parliament and begun his Personal Rule, neither he nor his young courtier, Sir Thomas  could  have dreamed that he was embarking on a course which would end with his royal head on the block.

    Leading up to this however, were years of unrest and finally Civil War during which the “trusty and well beloved Sir Thomas  Hanmer ” received a commission in the Royalist army to raise a band of  ‘Saggitarios’ ( archers)  for use in possible siege situations, something punishable by death if discovered by the Parliamentarians.  

    Not long afterwards however, his lands were sequesterd and he and Elizabeth and their two children left the country for Paris. Hanmer did however make several clandestine journeys back to England where he lived in various ‘hide-outs’ or was sheltered by friends.  Shortly after  arriving in Paris however, Elizabeth died and her husband swiftly returned to England after putting  his young son in seminary in Lisbon and leaving his daughter Trever, then about eight years old, in the care of a Huguenot family.  He lay low for a while at Hengrave Hall in Suffolk where he met and equally swiftly married another beauty, Mistress Susan Hervey.       They returned to France and lived simply for a while until, on payment of a hefty a fine, permission was obtained from Parliament to return home. At first they stayed with Sir Thomas’s mother at her Dower House in Halghton and it was at this period that Sir Thomas began to plan what he would do in his garden when he got back to his own estate at Bettisfield. It is thought likely that Lady Susan was also interested in gardening as  she had  a say in which plants were brought over from Halghton  and she was later painted with a copy of  John Parkinson’s famous herbal the   Paradisus in her hand.

     

Many  Royalists had been forced to flee abroad and their great estates, including Theobalds, the Cecil house where Gerard had gardened,  had been taken over by the Parliamentarians. Others like Hanmer, in more remote corners of country, were able to retire quietly to their estates. In Hanmer’s case the enforced leisure was no hardship, it gave him extra time with his family and his beloved flowers and even more importantly  the opportunity to write his Garden Book, a volume which gives us an unparalled insight into the plants of the period and a seventeenth century garden of a sizable  but by no means grand sort. The book too contains  information about contemporary gardening techniques and  clear descriptions of individual plants but what makes it such a delight is the  warmth with which  Hanmer  writes about his plants. His love and enthusiasm for them come leaping across the centuries.

     Hanmer makes it clear that he is writing about plants ‘without meddling with their medical qualities’, thus distancing himself completely from the old herbals. He grew a great number of different sorts of flowers: all the florist’s flowers, newly imported ‘strangers’, old-fashioned ( even then) traditional cottage-garden flowers, fruit trees and vines. Although Tulips were his favourites, and his own Agate Hanmer apparently an outstanding tulip, he obviously had a very soft spot for his  auriculas or beares eares of which he gives us this excellent description of “Beares Eares or Auriculas”:- “AURICUAL URSI  in Latine, this flower is a kind of Cowslip. Agreeing much with it in the sent and figure of the flowers, but different much in the greene leaves. It is very sweet, very various, very hardy easily encreaset, and soone at perfection, of fine forme, and beautiful colours, and agrees admirably well with ye Climate, soe it may seeme for all these good qualityes not inferiour to any flower this Countrey can produce.”

      In 1659, having finished the manuscript which Sir Thomas wrote with a beautiful and regular hand in  a thick quarto  book bound in brown calf, some pages must have remained blank for he continued to add further comments and notes over the next few years.

      Sir Thomas Hanmer became the local MP and lived the rest of his life at Bettisfield with his plants and his family. On the first page of the original MS is a tiny scribbled note to the effect that “ My grandchild Thomas Hanmer was born at Bettisfield on Monday betwixt ten and eleven at night being the twenty-fourth of September 1677.”   (The child another Sir Thomas Hanmer, grew up to become Speaker to the House of Commons.) The date proves that Hanmer was still adding notes to his Garden Book some twenty years after its ostensible completion. That it was intended for publication is apparent from the fact that it is addressed at time to ‘the reader’  and sad though it is that it lay forgotten for  almost three centuries, its eventual publication in 1933 presented us with one of the greatest treasures of garden literature.

 

Patricia Cleveland-Peck is at present engaged in writing a history of the auricula, or bear’ ear, one of Sir Thomas’s favourite flowers

Cover of Sir Thomas Hanmer’s Garden Book

To view auriculas click here#