Every month we feature two blogs written by volunteers, one describes an object in the Palace and one a plant from the Garden. It is a great way for us all to learn more about the Palace, if you would like to contribute there is no set format so please do send us your ideas!
Almost as much mystery surrounds the tale of William Laud’s tortoise as Edmund Bonner’s ghost, though this time there are one or two ‘nearly’ first hand accounts.
The tale re-surfaced in 2017 when a display at the Garden History museum included the alleged shell of said tortoise. This normally resides at the adjacent Lambeth Palace, where reports claim that the tortoise died in the 1750s.
Whoa, those who follow dates might say, Laud was around in the mid 17th century?! Yes, but tortoises are famously long-lived. One at Peterborough cathedral lived until the age of 220. William Laud’s apparently survived for more than century after it’s master was executed in 1645, four years before the king he served, Charles I.
But the story begins much earlier, in the Middle Ages, when exotic animals were among goods conveyed along various trade routes. Everything from lions and elephants to monkeys entered privileged households, often as gifts — they were important ‘status-enhancing’ accessories.
Henry VIII famously had an African grey parrot that talked, Thomas More and Samuel Pepys both had pet monkeys. Anne Boleyn refused the gift of a monkey, according to Jane Grigson (Menagerie 2015).
There are however, no other reports of tortoises being kept until one was acquired by William Laud around the time he became Bishop of London and, soon after, Chancellor of Oxford University — so in the late 1620s. Some reports say it was a gift from Laud’s Oxford College, St Johns though St Johns has no record.
We can imagine the tortoise enjoying the lovely grounds of Fulham Palace, when the bishop’s household decamped from the City for the summer months. But there are no actual reports. In fact the closest we get to this tortoise is via descriptions of its death. And even that has elements of mystery. The one ‘fact’ is that it was by now living at Lambeth Palace.
In 1633 William Laud was translated to Archbishop. A much quoted entry in his diary for 18 September that year reports that his coach, horses and men were loaded onto a ferry-boat for the journey across the river north bank to south.
Extract from Laud’s diary for 18 September 1633, copyright St John’s College Oxford
Overladen, presumably, the ferryboat ‘sank to the bottom of the Thames. ‘But I praise God for it” Laud wrote in his Diary, I lost neither man nor horse. Nor presumably his tortoise.
Laud would only enjoy 12 years as Archbishop. He was impeached for treason, for following perhaps too well, the king’s policies. His tortoise however, lived on until the 1750s, when it either it drowned when the Thames overflowed. Or a gardener dug it up for a wager while it was hibernating. Or a gardener a gardener cracked it’s shell with his spade— the preserved specimen does indeed have a crack.
It isn’t surprising that the tortoises end is veiled in mystery, what an embarrassment, after over a hundred years. The Archbishop at the time, George Herring, wrote to his friend, the 1st Earl of Hardwicke, Philip Yorke “I have put a tortoise in my garden here… I Hope he will like my coleworts, as well as those of St Kits, his native country. I have no foreboding from the circumstance that the first Archbishop (sic) that introduced a tortoise here lost his head”.
Selected sources:
Grigson Caroline: Menagerie; the History of Exotic Animals in England, Oxford University Press 2015
Laud William: Diary for 1633, archive of St John’s College Oxford contact Petra Hoffmann - archivist at St John's College Oxford
Murray John: Experimental Researches on the Light and Luminous Matter of the Glow-Worm, the Luminosity of the Sea, the Phenomena of the Chameleon, the Ascent of the Spider into the Atmosphere, and the Torpidity of the tortoise, & etc
Glasgow, published W.R. McPhan 1826; (re)published by Cambridge University Press 2013 ISBN 1108084036 pp 144ff see page 168
Susie Dawson, Volunteer Tour Guide
Please send your ideas for Object / Specimen of the Month blogs to rachel.bray@fulhampalace.org. If you would like some help, let us know.