John Evelyn

Artist Info

John EvelynWotton, England, 1620 - 1706, London

Evelyn, John (1620–1706), diarist and writer, was born on 31 October 1620 at Wotton in Surrey, the second son and fourth child of Richard Evelyn (1590–1640) and his wife, Eleanor (1599–1635), daughter of John Stansfield (d. 1627) and his wife, Elianor, née Comber (d. 1613). Evelyn believed that his family came from Shropshire and ultimately from Normandy. From his great-grandfather John, who first brought the invention of gunpowder into England, his grandfather George (1526–1603) inherited the patent for its manufacture that descended in the family until the outbreak of the civil war.

Education and the grand tour

Evelyn's father, Richard, who was the only son of George's second marriage (to Joan Stint), inherited Wotton with about 700 acres of land. He was worth £4000 a year, and became sheriff of Sussex and Surrey in 1633. Having been sent to stay with his maternal grandfather in Lewes at the age of five, Evelyn began to draw and sketch even before he went to school in 1630 and kept a diary in the following year. In 1632 his father wanted to send him to Eton College but was persuaded by his son to allow him to stay at the free school in Southover, a school where (Evelyn later believed) he had an inadequate education at the hands of Edward Snatt. His mother died in 1635 of an excessive remorse, Evelyn claimed, for the death of his sister Elizabeth (1614–1634) and other children dead in infancy. On 13 February 1637 Evelyn and his two brothers were admitted to the Middle Temple where his tutor was his later fellow traveller on the continent Thomas Henshaw. In April 1637 Evelyn was admitted fellow-commoner of Balliol College, Oxford, and matriculated on 29 May. His tutor was meant to be Ralph Bathurst (later a friend, and supervisor of his son's education) but instead he was assigned to George Bradshaw, whom Evelyn later believed negligent in his duty. Like many of his rank, he left without a degree.

In July 1641, in the company of Mary, princess royal, Evelyn made his first journey to the continent, remaining in Holland and Belgium until the following October. A year later he was present at the battle of Brentford, but realizing that he could do the king's side no service, he procured another licence to travel and by November 1643 he was in Calais. This was the beginning of a visit that lasted nearly four years, to France and Italy, a journey on which Thomas Howard advised him, and which has become one of the great seventeenth-century examples of the grand tour. At the end of that tour, in June 1647, Evelyn married Mary Browne [see Evelyn, Mary (c.1635–1709)], the daughter of the English resident in Paris, Sir Richard Browne, though they did not cohabit until three years later.

At the age of eleven Evelyn began to keep the notes from which his best-known work, the Diary, was subsequently composed. Probably it began in the same sort of almanac that he used for the year 1637 and that is in the library of Balliol College. He did not put these notes into the form of what is now the Diary until the 1680s, and many of the entries about the continent, Beer points out (Evelyn, Diary, 1.87–101), make use of later guidebooks that refer to things Evelyn could not have seen himself. Certainly the diary contains both his personal reflections and what is more like news reporting. It exists in essentially two forms: a work called De vita propria which covers the period from 1620 to 1644 (which Beer prints separately), and another called the Kalendarium which covers his life from 1620 to 1697 (BL Add. MSS 78323–78325) and covers much of the material in De vita propria though with significant variations. In addition there are some loose sheets covering the period between 1697 and 1706, and a later transcript of De vita propria made by his grandson Sir John Evelyn (BL, Add. MS 78326) in 1737. Beer's edition of the Diary supersedes all others and, with Evelyn's correspondence, provides the primary basis of his life record. Like most of Evelyn's manuscripts, these are all now in the British Library.

The interregnum and Elysium Britannicum

Evelyn's return to England in 1647 signalled his first engagement with property: both that which he had inherited in 1640 from his father and the lease of Sayes Court, Deptford, a 200 acre estate (Evelyn, letter copybook, 2, fol. 22v, letter 469 (467)) which his father-in-law had held from the crown. The execution of Charles I in 1649 was for him a dark day that he never forgot or forgave, and it confirmed him in a suspicion of public life that remained with him in spite of his later contribution to it. In 1652 his wife moved to London and gave birth to their first child, Richard (1652–1658). He was the first of eight children, only four of whom reached adulthood. John Stansfield (1653–1654), George (1657–1658), and a second Richard (b. and d. 1664) died in infancy. John Evelyn (1655–1699), the only son to survive childhood, was never well, and two of his sisters, Mary Evelyn (1665–1685) [see under Evelyn, Mary (c.1635–1709)] and Elizabeth (1667–1685), died young of smallpox. Only Susanna (1669–1754) outlived her father.

The deaths of three young children in the 1650s, as well as the increasingly hostile climate of the interregnum, darkened Evelyn's youthful exuberance but established his lifelong interest in pedagogy and education. This was first reflected in his translation of St John Chrysostom's Golden Book (1659), which Evelyn dedicated to the memory of his first son, the infant prodigy Richard, the subject of a moving tribute in his Diary. In a letter to Samuel Hartlib in 1660 Evelyn also praised the usefulness of John Comenius's Orbis sensualium pictus (1659) to children's education (Evelyn, letter copybook 2, fol. 22v, letter 467 (165)). Later he both employed Milton's nephew Edward Phillips as tutor to his son John and encouraged him to contribute to Edmund Gibson's 1695 edition of William Camden's Britannia to which he himself contributed. A series of unpublished treatises on educational subjects (BL, Add. MS 15950) and later letters to Samuel Pepys, Charles Spencer, Robert Berkeley, and Francis Godolphin also represent this tutorial side of his character. He first met William Wotton, the instigator of the ancients and moderns controversy, as a child prodigy, and although Evelyn himself was never simply an ancient or a modern, he encouraged Wotton in his part in the controversy and urged him to write the life of Robert Boyle.

In 1652 Evelyn began to create the garden at Sayes Court, a project that signalled the beginning of his serious interest in botany and garden history. This led to his writing the Elysium Britannicum (BL, Add. MSS 78342–78344), an encyclopaedic history of gardens and gardening practices that occupied him for most of his life. It was first proposed to Sir Thomas Browne in 1655 and publicly announced in Evelyn's The French Gardiner (a translation of Nicolas de Bonnefons's Le jardinier françois) in 1659. The Elysium project led also to the extensive ‘information exchange’ on horticulture that grew out of garden making, an exchange that is reflected in Evelyn's two letter copybooks (BL, Add. MSS 78298–78299) and elsewhere. Learned as the intention of the project was, it also attracted the correspondence of many ordinary gardeners or ‘planters of coleworts’, as Evelyn frequently described himself. Among these were George London and Henry Wise, the founders of the Brompton nursery, and Moses Cook, the gardener at Cassiobury who, like John Rose, another of Evelyn's correspondents, became a partner in that enterprise.

Through Samuel Hartlib's ‘Office of address’, Evelyn also came to know John Beale, a pioneer of pomiculture in Herefordshire, who introduced Evelyn to Le Gendre's Manière de cultiver les arbres fruitiers which Evelyn translated and published in 1660 as The Manner of Ordering Fruit-Trees. Beale also contributed to Evelyn's Pomona (1664), and offered extensive material for Elysium Britannicum (BL, Add. MSS 78312, 78313). In a robust and extensive correspondence in the early 1660s Beale also challenged Evelyn to redefine his thoughts about the nature of gardens. Beale encouraged him to move away from the French model of Pierre Morin which was the source of the first flower garden at Sayes Court, and to pursue the idea of extensive or rural gardening with trees that Evelyn also discussed in letters with Sir Richard Browne (BL, Add. MS 78306).

Having experimented with garden design at Wotton in 1643 and again in 1652 Evelyn went on to create a garden for his old neighbours and friends the Howards at Albury. He also consulted with Arthur Capel, earl of Essex, about the design of Cassiobury, the first garden to be made entirely with trees. And at Euston, Lord Arlington's estate in Suffolk, he recommended laying out the grounds in a way that anticipated the landscape gardens of the mid-eighteenth century.

Evelyn's interest in science led to other research and publication. The first book of his translation of Lucretius's De rerum natura was published in 1656 (An Essay on the First Book of T. Lucretius Carus De rerum natura), though the remaining books were not published until 2000 (ed. M. Repetski). The abortion of this project was due partly to Evelyn's disgust with the slovenly proof-reading of the text in his absence, a problem that was to continue to plague his books. There are also documents on scientific subjects among his manuscripts. His ‘Coelum sanitatis’ (BL, Add. MS 78346), a translation of an anonymous alchemical work, represents his belief that translation was part of the work of extending Bacon's Great Instauration. More significant are his ‘Medicus itinerarius’ and related papers (BL, Add. MSS 78336–78338) as well as the famous anatomical tables done for him in Padua in 1646 and published in the Philosophical Transactions in 1702 (12, no. 158). There are also manuscripts on mathematics, physics, mechanics (BL, Add. MS 78333), natural history, and chemistry (BL, Add. MSS 78335, 78346), in the last of which he was instructed by Nicholas Le Fèvre in Paris. The most complete of Evelyn's library catalogues (1687, BL, Add. MS 78632) also indicates his interest in books on all these subjects, as well as grammar, law, philology, philosophy, poetry, mechanics, and theology.

Many of Evelyn's books and manuscripts were alienated from the collection both before and after his death, not least by William Upcott, the editor of his Miscellaneous Writings (1825). The chief dispersal of his library, however, was in the Christies sale of 1977 when his collection of prints, largely purchased in Italy, and his furniture (including two cabinets for his collection of curiosities) were also sold. Most of the books from Evelyn's library containing significant marginalia are now in the British Library and have their own pressmark (EVE). (An alphabetical list of them was published by Michael Hunter in John Evelyn in the British Library, 1995). The marginalia in these books reflect Evelyn's sense of a text as cumulative and exemplify his refusal to see any document as complete.

In 1664 Evelyn's friend Abraham Cowley wrote and dedicated an essay and pindaric ode on gardens to Evelyn; Evelyn's pindaric ode in reply is less well known. He later revised the ode for another gardening friend, the second countess of Clarendon, about her garden at Swallowfield. Apart from the Lucretius translation, all of which is in verse, there is a considerable body of occasional poetry among his manuscripts, including the letters. He also wrote a play, Thersander, and advised his cousin Sir Samuel Tuke on his translation of the Spanish play The Adventures of Five Hours (1663).

Evelyn's pioneering work on tree cultivation (Sylva, 1664) and on soils (A Philosophical Discourse of Earth, 1676; in later editions entitled Terra: a philosophical discourse) were both outgrowths of the Elysium Britannicum. Although primarily intended to encourage tree planting after the devastation of the civil war, Sylva was a learned work addressed more to gentlemen than to foresters. In it he introduced the word ‘avenues’ into the English language of landscaping. By its fourth edition it contained ‘an Historical Account of the Sacredness and Use of Standing Groves’ that demonstrates its relation to the Elysium project. Sylva's handsome reissue with additional plates by Alexander Hunter in 1776 gave it a renewed popularity. The subjects of both Sylva and Terra are also extensively represented in his manuscript collections, including his incomplete treatise on staves (BL, JE MS D13.2) and his notes on husbandry (BL, Add. MS 78340). Never more than an amateur scientist, Evelyn was none the less one of the virtuosi who formed the Georgical committee of what became the Royal Society in 1661 [see Founder members of the Royal Society]. In 1659 (Evelyn, letter copybook, 2, fol. 19, letter 159 (155), 1 Oct 1659), he both proposed a model for the society to his friend Robert Boyle and contributed to Boyle's A History of Cold (1665, pp. 407–9).

In his lifetime Evelyn also published works that were part of the unpublished Elysium Britannicum: Kalendarium hortense (1664) and Acetaria (1699), as well as a paper in the Philosophical Transactions in 1670 on Lord Sandwich's discovery in Spain of an early seed drill, the ‘sembrador’ (5.60). In the twentieth century a further Elysium-related document was published: his Directions for the Gardiner at Sayes Court (1932). Also related to the Elysium were Evelyn's translation of Nicolas de Bonnefons's Le jardinier françois (1659), a book Evelyn believed the best introduction to vegetable gardening, and The Compleat Gard'ner (1693), a translation of the work by la Quintinie in which Evelyn was probably assisted both by Thomas Creech and George London who, with Thomas Wise, brought out a condensed version in 1699. His wife's work in the still room also contributed to the Elysium proposal, as did his own notes on culinary and other subjects (BL, JE MS D4). Throughout Evelyn's correspondence from 1660 onwards there are also many letters related to what Evelyn frequently called ‘my hortulan affair’.

The Restoration

Evelyn's earliest publications were essentially royalist tracts: A Character of England (1659), An Apology for the Royal Party (1659), and The Late Newes from Brussels Unmasked (1660). All of them were published before the Restoration. Although, like his father, Evelyn was loath to be drawn into public life, much of his life after 1660 was involved with public affairs of one sort or another. Fumifugium (1661), the first English book on pollution, announces his commitment to the improvement of public life, evident in his agreement to serve as a commissioner of the sewers the previous year. Thereafter he found himself on other committees of this kind: for licensing hackney coaches (1663), reforming the streets (1662–4), regulating the Royal Mint and Gresham College (1663), repairing St Paul's Cathedral (1666), or even for replanning London after the great fire (1667, London Revived, ed. E. S. de Beer, 1938), a disaster of which he wrote a powerful account in his Diary.

These were far less important and time-consuming than Evelyn's appointment to the commission for the sick and wounded in the Second and Third Anglo-Dutch Wars (1664–7; 1672–4) that consumed a large part of his energy and resources for the better part of a decade. He was also a member of the council for foreign plantations (later trade and plantations, 1670–74). Already an investor in the East India Company, Evelyn was thereby enabled to pursue his interests in botany, exploration, and trade, interests that led to his friendship with William Dampier. He was also a commissioner of the privy seal in the difficult period preceding James II's abdication (1685–7), and treasurer of the commissioners for erecting Greenwich Hospital (1695–1703).

The corruption of public and private life, especially at court, is a theme that runs through Evelyn's correspondence. It appears as early as his description of dissolute public gatherings in A Character of England (1659) and reappears in his argument for legal restraint on luxury in Tyrannus, or, The Mode (1661). Not surprisingly it also appears in the writing of his pious and studious daughter Mary.

In spite of his desire to avoid the court, Evelyn found it necessary to pursue great men of office in an attempt to settle legal cases. One was over the ownership of Sayes Court that had been thrown into question by the civil war. The other was over the money owed to Evelyn's father-in-law for his work as English agent of the crown in Paris during the interregnum. Although Charles II had promised to reimburse Sir Richard, this claim was not settled until 1687. In the meantime Sir Richard's brother-in-law was suing for reimbursement of the money that he had lent Sir Richard for his expenses at that time.

While his son John went abroad in 1675 in the household of the first Lord Berkeley, Evelyn stayed behind to manage the Berkeley estate and later advised Lady Berkeley on the development of what is now Berkeley Square. He was also a lifelong friend of Anne Digby, wife of the second Lord Sunderland, the wily prime minister in all but name. Arlington, Clarendon, Clifford, Fox, Godolphin, Mordaunt, and Osborne were all his close acquaintances, but he was never at the centre of politics, nor wished to be, and his literary controversy with Sir George Mackenzie in 1665 about whether the public or the private life was to be preferred was as much an old-fashioned exercise in academic disputation as an endorsement of public employment. Commanded by Charles II to write about the history of the conflict between the Dutch and the English over the sovereignty of the seas (BL, Add. MS JE Gq), Evelyn found his labours rejected as malapropos in a time of peace. The introduction was published as Navigation and Commerce in 1674, but the rest of his history, given to Pepys for his proposed history of the navy, was lost.

Later works

Although Evelyn continued to be interested in the work of the Royal Society, he was increasingly out of sympathy and touch with the direction that it took—towards an exclusivist science and away from the arts and the wide range of humanist interests that had been part of its early mandate. His attitude to knowledge was essentially encyclopaedic rather than taxonomic, connotative rather than denotative. He celebrated Boyle's invention of the air-pump and recognized how it might be used to vacuum-pack food, but he was disgusted by the cruelty of a dog's vivisection in 1667. The great works of his later life are on the arts: Sculptura (1661); his translations of Gabriel Naudé's Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque (Instructions Concerning Erecting of a Library, 1661) and of Roland Fréart's Parallèle de l'architecture antique et de la moderne (Parallel of Architecture, 1664) and Idée de la perfection de la peinture (Idea of the Perfection of Painting, 1668); and Numismata (1697).

Sculptura, or, The History, and Art of Chalcography and Engraving in Copper represents Evelyn's project (evident as early as his manuscript notes from the 1650s) to fulfil one of Bacon's recommendations to compile a history of trades. But Sculptura also recognizes the earlier work of Giacomo Favi, who is celebrated in its preface by Samuel de Sorbière. Evelyn's manuscript ‘Trades. Secrets and receipts mechanical’ (BL, Add. MS 78341) and its variant, ‘Circle of mechanical trades’ at the Royal Society, were motivated by his desire to protect the arts from vulgarization by defining their function. As with Elysium Britannicum, Sculptura was concerned more with the skills of the artist and virtuoso than the mere mechanic. The book announces the invention of the mezzotint, as represented by one done by Prince Rupert, but it is concerned to guard that invention from being ‘prostituted’.

Whether Evelyn discovered the woodcarver Grinling Gibbons (as he claimed, Evelyn, Diary, 3.567) has been disputed, but certainly Evelyn was interested in the encouragement of artists of all kinds. His translation of Fréart's Parallèle de l'architecture antique et de la moderne, augmented by an account of modern architects in the third edition published just after his death, celebrates his friend Wren and refutes the claim that Lord Burlington rescued Palladio from obscurity. His translation of Fréart's Idée de la perfection de la peinture reflects his own keen interest in painting as a young man as well as his own landscape and portrait drawings and those of his wife and daughter. His portrait was painted by Chanterell when he was six and again by van der Borcht when he was twenty. His best-known portraits are by Walker in 1648 (now in the National Portrait Gallery) and Kneller in 1679 and 1685, but perhaps the most engaging is the drawing made in 1650 by Nanteuil that was subsequently engraved. Evelyn also continued to number among his friends such painters as Lely, Kneller, and Verrio. His friendship with Wren grew out of several architectural projects in which they were both interested—the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford, the rebuilding of Whitehall, Chelsea Hospital, and the rebuilding of St Paul's. And Evelyn spent a good deal of time in 1667 ensuring that the great collection of classical inscriptions assembled by his friend Thomas Howard, earl of Arundel, be given a home at Oxford. For this he was awarded a DCL by the University of Oxford in 1669.

Evelyn's Numismata is as much about the depiction of physiognomy as it is about its ostensible subject, medals. Ranging as it does over a wide range of subjects, it reflects at the end of Evelyn's life his continuing commitment to the plurality of knowledge. In it is also contained the story of the motto by which Evelyn is still best known to the general public, Decus et tutamen (‘an ornament and a defence’), suggested by him to Sir Henry Slingsby for the new milled coinage and still on the English £1 coin. This motto is the title of John Brydall's book on the laws of England, a work that Evelyn listed in the 1687 catalogue of his library. One of the four catalogues of his books, it represents his lifelong concern for book collecting and cataloguing that led him to translate the Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque (1661) by Cardinal Mazarin's librarian Naudé. He also offered advice to Arlington and Pepys about their libraries, arranged the gift of the library of Henry Howard, sixth duke of Norfolk, to the Royal Society, and encouraged the establishment of a public library at St James's Palace under the care of his friend Richard Bentley.

Collections of the writings of others also constitute a major part of what is one of the more extensive sorts of writing by Evelyn, the religious. Among his posthumously published works (1850) is his 830-page History of Religion (BL, Add. MS 78367). Begun by him in 1657, it was added to as late as 1704 and arose from Evelyn's doubts about his own religion during the persecution of the Church of England in the interregnum. In part it is a response to the conversion to Roman Catholicism in this period both of John Cosin, the son of his friend Bishop Cosin, and of Evelyn's distant cousin Thomas Keightley. But it also represents Evelyn's long-standing interest in religious subjects, an interest reflected in the large number of clergy who were among his friends, including many bishops and most of the archbishops of Canterbury from the Restoration until his death. Evelyn's falling-out with his brother-in-law William Glanville near the end of his life was because of the latter's Socinianism (disbelief in the Trinity), a subject on which he had a firm and outspoken position.

Among Evelyn's manuscripts are his annotated Bible (BL, Add. MSS 78360–78361), his collection of lectures from the New Testament (BL, Add. MS 78363), and his ‘briefe Account of divers Sermons’ (BL, Add. MS 78365), on some of which he drew for the Diary. He also published three other works on religion: Another Part of the Mystery of Jesuitism (1664), a translation of a work by Antoine Arnauld; The Pernicious Consequences of the New Heresie of the Jesuites (1666), a translation of a work by Pierre Nicole; and The History of the Three Late Famous Impostors (1669), accounts of three religious cheats, two of them gleaned from Pietro Cesii and the third from Sir Paul Rycaut.

Even Evelyn's letter to Boyle about the buildings for a Royal Society (Evelyn, letter copybook, 159) reflects his religious interests. It sounds as much like a proposal for a monastery as an academy. Among his religious papers there are also devotional collections and offices from the interregnum, most of them composed for Margaret Godolphin between 1672 and 1675 (BL, Add. MSS 78375–78385). Much has been made of the apparently pathological element in Evelyn's attachment to her, but this approach fails to consider the intense strain of high-church devotion that existed, largely apart from the court, in the late seventeenth century. Evelyn first met Margaret in 1672, and the anniversary of her death in childbirth in 1678 is one that he never forgot. A maid of honour to Catherine of Braganza, she represented to him everything that the court was not: intelligence, piety, and modesty.

After the death in 1691 of his nephew John, the last surviving son of Evelyn's elder brother George, Evelyn arranged to inherit the family estate, Wotton, and he moved there with his wife in 1694, leaving Sayes Court in the hands of his son-in-law William Draper. Evelyn's inheriting Wotton was not without challenge by his brother's granddaughters: he had to contest a case in the House of Commons in 1698, the year before his brother's death. In 1696 Sayes Court was let to Admiral Benbow, who in turn sublet it (through William III) to the youthful Peter the Great, thereby precipitating its ruin. Although Evelyn continued to travel to London about Greenwich Hospital business his life was based at Wotton; it was at his son's house in Dover Street, London, that he died at the age of eighty-five on 27 February 1706. He was buried in the chancel of Wotton church.

Long dismissed as a virtuoso dabbler in the arts and sciences, Evelyn has now come to be recognized as a scholar and participant in the reception of the new science of the seventeenth century. Over a period of more than half a century his voluminous correspondence reflected and extended the social and scientific interchange of his time. His enthusiasm for horticulture in particular, both in his own garden at Sayes Court and in his correspondence and publications, translated continental ideas into England and laid the groundwork for the English landscape garden of the eighteenth century.

Douglas D. C. Chambers

Sources P. Beal and others, Index of English literary manuscripts, ed. P. J. Croft and others, [4 vols. in 11 pts] (1980–), vol. 2, pt 1, pp. 461–87 · Evelyn, Diary · J. Evelyn, letter copybooks, RS · G. Keynes, John Evelyn: a study in bibliophily with a bibliography of his writings (1968) · Evelyn's furniture (1977) [sale catalogue, Christie, Manson & Woods, London, 31 March 1977] · English, old master and modern prints (1977) [sale catalogue, Christie, Manson & Woods, London, 26 July 1977] · The Evelyn library, 4 vols. (22 June 1977–13 July 1978) [sale catalogues, Christie, Manson & Woods, London, 22–3 June 1977; 30 Nov – 1 Dec 1977; 15–16 March 1978; 12–13 July 1978] · Valuable printed books and a few manuscripts (1978) [sale catalogue, Christie, Manson & Woods, London, 8 Nov 1978] · The Evelyn family library (1977) [sale catalogue, Christie, Manson & Woods, London, 12 Oct 1977] · F. Harris, ‘Living in the neighbourhood of science: Mary Evelyn, Margaret Cavendish and the Greshamites’, Women, science, and medicine, 1500–1700, ed. L. Hunter and S. Hutton (1997), 198–217 · M. Hunter, ‘John Evelyn in the 1650s: a virtuoso in quest of a role’, Science and the shape of orthodoxy: intellectual change in late seventeenth-century Britain (1995), 67–98 · M. Hunter, Establishing the new science: the experience of the early Royal Society (1989) · T. O'Malley and J. Wolschke-Buhlmann, John Evelyn's Elysium Britannicum and European gardening (Dumbarton Oaks Research Library, Washington, 1997) · ‘John Evelyn in the British Library’, Book Collector, 44/2 and BL (1995) · G. de la Bédoyère, ed., Particular friends: the correspondence of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn (1997) · G. de la Bédoyère, ‘John Evelyn's library catalogue’, Book Collector, 43/4 (1994) · J. Evelyn, Elysium Britannicum, or, The royal gardens, ed. J. Ingram (2001) · Pepys, Diary · M. Hunter, The Royal Society and its fellows, 1660–1700: the morphology of an early scientific institution (1982) · DNB · GEC, Baronetage · HoP, Commons, 1660–90 · Munk, Roll · GEC, Peerage

Archives Balliol Oxf., almanacs · BL, Add. MSS, Evelyn MSS · BL, collection of annotated pamphlets and engravings · BL, corresp., notes, and papers, Add. MSS 15948, 15950 · BL, diaries and papers · Bodl. Oxf., notes on John Aubrey's Monumenta Britannica · Harvard U., Houghton L., letters and literary MSS · Magd. Cam., essays on the fishery and notes · RS, essays, lectures, and papers · RS, letter-books · TNA: PRO, ‘Narrative of the encounter between the French and Spanish ambassadors’, SP 29/43/12 · U. Cal., Los Angeles, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, letters and papers · Yale U., Beinecke L., annotated ‘publick employment preferr'd’ · Yale U., Beinecke L., letters :: Arundel Castle, West Sussex, copy of earl of Arundel's ‘Remembrances’ · BL, letters to Sir Hans Sloane, Sloane MSS 4037, 4039, 4075 · Bodl. Oxf., autograph, Ashmole, Rawlinson, Tanner MSS · Helmingham Hall, Stowmarket, letters to Lord Huntingtower · Ransom HRC, letters to Samuel Pepys and papers · Trinity Cam., corresp. with Richard Bentley

Likenesses H. van der Borcht, oils, 1641, NPG · R. Walker, oils, 1648, NPG [see illus.] · R. Nanteuil, line engraving, 1650, BM, NPG · R. Gaywood, etching, 1654, BM · G. Kneller, oils, 1689 · T. Bragg, line engraving (after G. Kneller), BM, NPG; repro. in W. Bray, ed., Memoirs of John Evelyn, 2 vols. (1818)

Wealth at death in 1703 total annual revenue recorded as £2328: Harvard U., Houghton L., Houghton MS 992.2, p. 23 · bequeathed annuity of £144 p.a. to granddaughter; left grandson (only male heir) £2300 and £300, plus remaining estate and books: will, 20 Feb 1706, BL, Evelyn MSS, BL JEI 11, copy in TNA: PRO B1/55

Douglas D. C. Chambers, ‘Evelyn, John (1620–1706)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/8996, accessed 20 June 2014]