James Brydges, who wrote to Hans Sloane and moved in the same circles as John Perceval, was born to the eighth Baron Chandos in 1674 and would become Earl of Carnarvon in 1714 and the first Duke of Chandos in 1719. Brydges was also a man who kept track of his correspondence. He finished the last of fifty-seven volumes of outgoing letters in 1744, the year he died at age seventy.58 Between 1700 and 1712 he had also kept fourteen volumes of incoming letters.59 He had begun these letter books when he was appointed paymaster of the queen’s troops in his early thirties, but keeping a written record of his life was not new to him. Years before, he had kept a journal of his social rounds in London.60 Writing letters and cultivating acquaintances helped Brydges organize his business and social world. Collecting art and the musical talents of men like Handel, who lived at Brydges’s estate of Cannons for a number of years, were also ways Brydges attempted to signal his arrival in the upper ranks of the aristocracy. His estate of Cannons, so brilliant when it was finished in 1724 that Daniel Defoe declared “a pen can but ill describe it, the pencil not much better,” was his almost overwrought declaration of social status.61 However, Cannons was dismantled and demolished a few years after his death and it is his letters that remain.
The letters of Brydges’s second wife, Cassandra, do not survive in the same bulk as her husband’s correspondence, but she too kept letter books.62 Cassandra Willoughby was born in 1670 to an eminent naturalist (in fact her tutor John Ray was Hans Sloane’s great friend) and the daughter of a governor of the East India Company (her mother’s second husband would be Sir Josiah Child, an influential governor of the East India Company). Cassandra dedicated her early years to the running of her brother’s estate in west Nottingham, where she pulled together her first short letter book of seventeen pages that held letters from the mid-1690s to the early years of the eighteenth century.63 These were outgoing letters she composed to other people; meaning that she either kept drafts she later added to her book or copied these into the book before she sent them off. It was also around this time that she began to keep a travel diary that recorded, beginning in 1695, the places she went on one side and the occurrences that blessed or befell those in her social orbit on the other. She continued to keep this travel diary for four years after her marriage to her cousin James Brydges in 1713 at the age of forty-three. Her marriage also saw her picking up the pen to begin another letter book she would keep until her death in 1735.64 Like those in her previous letter book these were outgoing letters she seems to have copied down to keep track of her world.
Far away in Lancashire, Nicholas Blundell also kept a letter book of outgoing letters. In 1669, Blundell had been born into a long-standing Catholic recusant family in the north of England and spent time in his youth in Flanders being educated at the Jesuit college of St. Omer. This was one of the few times he would leave the embrace of his estate in Little Crosby (the other was when he went into voluntary exile in Flanders for a year after the failed Jacobite Rising of 1715). To a degree, his world was substantially different from that of the others discussed here. He was less mobile and less interested in the wider social world of London. Unlike many of these letter writers, his path would not cross theirs over the years, but like them he recorded his letters. In his early thirties he found himself the head of the family when his father died in 1702. It was at this time that he picked up a pen and began keeping both a letter book and diary.65 He kept the diary almost daily until 1728 and recorded his letters less consistently until 1731. The diary reflects the daily life of a member of the English gentry who was deeply involved in the workings of his estate. His letter book shows a member of the English gentry reaching out beyond that local world to correspondents in, among other locations, London and the Chesapeake.
The voices of Nicholas Blundell, Cassandra and James Brydges, Peter Collinson, Hans Sloane, William Byrd (father and son), and John Perceval reverberate through this book. But theirs are not the only letters that speak. Many of these collections included incoming letters, which allow the voices of their correspondents to come through loud and clear. Friends and relatives, like philosopher George Berkeley, Perceval’s great friend, and John Custis, Byrd the younger’s brother-in-law, become as familiar as the main correspondents. The pen of Margaret Ray, the wife of one of Sloane’s good friends, scratches loudly, as do those of Lady Petre, Peter Collinson’s patron, and Helena le Grand, Perceval’s witty cousin. We hear from those who were not members of the British elite, as the voices of John Perceval’s tenants, James Brydges’s employees, and William Byrd (I & II)’s factors and ship captains echo through their letters. Within these sets of correspondence vibrant, expansive, and elaborate networks hum with life.
The letters these writers preserved provide the raw materials to reconstruct the networks they nurtured. The form in which letters survived helps and complicates this process. Perceval, the two Byrds, James and Cassandra Brydges, and Blundell all kept letter books. These individuals chose to transcribe and retain these sets of letters. Their books tell the story of their businesses, financial affairs, government posts, and personal lives that they wished or needed to keep. Within them lay traces of their chosen networks. John Perceval, William Byrd, II, James Brydges, and Nicholas Blundell also kept diaries, which often provide a glimpse of their local networks and place their letter writing activities in a larger context. But correspondents did not place all their letters into letter books. Autograph letters, like those that make up the bulk of Sloane’s correspondence, might speak with less authority about the favored networks of their writers, but they whisper important secrets about how they wrote and sent their letters. Autograph letters often contain a scribbled address, a postmark, or a disintegrating seal that still clings to the paper. The vast letter collection of the earls of Huntingdon holds many of these broken seals and scrawled addresses. The letters of the earls, their families, and those connected to them survive in bulk and usually in autograph form from the late fifteenth century into the late nineteenth century. The early letters of this family, from 1600 through the later seventeenth century, reveal the placement of seals, the wording of early addresses, and how and when their writers turned to the postal system after its introduction.66 These autograph letters sing in a way their copied siblings cannot. They show the material reality of these letters. You can measure how much space the writers left between their salutations and the bodies of their letters, you can see where writers placed their postscripts, and you can evaluate the neatness of their hands. Their addresses and postmarks suggest how letter writers sent their epistles. Both kinds of letters, those enshrined in letter books and those surviving in their original state, have a place in this work for both, in complementary ways, reveal the workings of the epistolary world.
The lives of these correspondents also illuminate the way figures from the periphery of the British world positioned themselves. All these correspondents lived on the margins, geographically or socially, of the British elite and were relatively mobile. John Perceval, born in Ireland, spent much of his life trying and failing to gain an English title. Hans Sloane’s father was a Scot; Sloane himself was born in Ireland and died in England. Sloane’s father was a land agent for an earl and Sloane’s daughter the mother of one. Peter Collinson was an English merchant whose interest in botany led him to share his enthusiasm with members of the British aristocracy and Pennsylvania farmers. The two William Byrds both ended their lives in Virginia, but both maintained connections to those in England until their deaths. James Brydges and Cassandra Willoughby, both English born and bred, had deep connections to powerful trading interests. In fact, James Brydges spent some time in his youth in Constantinople, where his father was the British ambassador thanks to his family ties with the Levant Company. This mobile son of a mere baron would strive to see himself crowned “Princely” Chandos. Cassandra too fought to find a place. She gained power through the management of an estate as a young woman and continued to use those skills by marrying her cousin