Margaret Cavendish Bentinck's Shell Cabinet and the 1786 Sale

In the spring of 1786 anyone with five shillings could buy a catalogue and walk into a dead duchess’s house in Privy Garden, Whitehall. The catalogue served as a ticket of admission for the ten days of viewing and the weeks of auction that followed.¹ What was on offer was the collection of Margaret Cavendish Bentinck, Duchess Dowager of Portland, who had died the previous July. Its preface made a large claim for one part of it: in conchology, the study of shells, “no Collection in Europe can equal that of her Grace’s in Number and Variety.”¹

Most of the shells described in that catalogue are now untraceable. The catalogue itself survives in many copies, and with the letters of the duchess’s closest friend, Mary Delany, it is the main way to see what the collection was and how it was taken apart.

A collector at Whitehall and Bulstrode

Margaret Cavendish Harley was the only surviving child of Edward Harley, later 2nd Earl of Oxford, and his wife Henrietta, daughter of the Duke of Newcastle. In 1734 she married William Bentinck, 2nd Duke of Portland.² The University of Nottingham, which holds the Portland family papers, describes her as having assembled the largest collection in Britain, with fine art and natural history side by side. Her botany brought her into friendship with the plantsman Philip Miller and the botanical painter Georg Dionysius Ehret, and she had, in the archive’s words, “a special interest in sea shells.”²

She divided her life between the town house at Whitehall and the country house at Bulstrode in Buckinghamshire.³ Delany’s letters show both places in use as working collections. Writing from Whitehall in August 1768, Delany described being summoned at noon “to the museum above stairs,” where the duchess showed her “about a tenth part of the new prints and shells she has acquired since we last met.”⁴ In 1770 she reported that the University of Oxford had sent the duchess the new edition of Martin Lister’s work on shells, inscribed to her.⁴ By late 1771 Bulstrode was full of minerals as well: Delany wrote of days spent examining stalactites and selenites, and of new “pictures, sparrs, minerals” that had enriched the duchess’s dressing-room and cabinets.⁴

Naming the shells

A great collection of shells was not only a display. The duchess wanted hers named and described according to the classification of Carl Linnaeus, and she employed men who could do it.

The first was the Reverend John Lightfoot, a botanist and later author of the Flora Scotica. In November 1768 Delany wrote, with some amusement, that the duchess and “the ingenious Mr. Lightfoot” had at their fingers’ ends a learned author she spelled “Krachschenninnechoff,” “with a million more little inferior in sound,” so that an ignorant listener “might expect to see the candles turn blue, and that they were at their incantations.”⁴ The nineteenth-century editor of the letters adds that Lightfoot drew up for the duchess a catalogue of the contents of her museum.⁵

The second was Daniel Solander, the Swedish pupil of Linnaeus who had sailed with Joseph Banks on Cook’s first Pacific voyage. A review of Beth Fowkes Tobin’s study of the collection reports her finding that Banks and Solander visited the duchess at Bulstrode in 1771, soon after the Endeavour returned, and that the duchess obtained shells from Cook’s voyages through Cook, Banks, Solander and others.³ Delany’s letter of November 1771 records the visiting party and the plans for an account of the voyage, and adds that “Our little friend, Mr. Lightfoot, made no small figure in the group.”⁴ In July 1778 she wrote from Bulstrode that Solander was coming that day with the Swedish botanist Baron Alströmer, “so we shall be very philosophical,” with Lightfoot of the party.⁵

From about 1778 Solander worked on the shells one day a week. The Cook Museum in Whitby says he came every Tuesday from eleven in the morning until six in the evening.⁶ Sources differ on how long this lasted: about three years in the museum’s account, nearly four in the review of Tobin’s book.⁶³ The museum says he stopped work in 1781; either way the catalogue was left unfinished, and he died on 13 May 1782.⁶⁷ Six days later a friend writing to Delany from Bill Hill asked to be remembered to the duchess and was “sory for her loss in Mr. Solander.”⁷ According to the Cook Museum, his paper slips of descriptions passed to Banks and are now in the Natural History Museum in London.⁶

What the Delany letters show

The correspondence is useful because it shows the ordinary, physical work of a collection, not just its prizes. Shells came in by many routes. In September 1780 Delany wrote that the duchess’s gardener, Mr. Agnew, “seems to understand shells almost as well as plants, and supplies her with land and river shells.”⁵ Delany kept a shell collection of her own and, as the editor notes, made “quantities of little trays of cards” to hold and divide her shells, sending one as a pattern to a friend in 1781.⁷ The review of Tobin’s book reports that she devotes much of a chapter to this kind of handling: cleaning, boxing and labelling specimens.³

Not every delivery was welcome. In December 1783 Mary Hamilton, a young friend staying at Bulstrode, kept a diary of the household. One afternoon, with Lightfoot at his table and manuscripts, a barrel of West India shells arrived to be looked over. Hamilton teased Lightfoot by pretending oysters were coming to eat; the duchess then judged the shells “good for nothing,” and afterwards picked out fossils and shells from her own drawers as a gift for her guest, with Agnew helping to sort them.⁷

Eighteen months later the household broke up. In the early summer of 1785 the duchess fell ill, seemed to be mending, and moved to Bulstrode, where Delany was with her by early July. She died there on 17 July 1785, with Delany beside her.⁷ Horace Walpole, writing on 19 July, had just heard the news by a postscript and feared “it is but too true.”⁷

The sale of 1786

The collection did not stay in the family. On why, the sources disagree. The Cook Museum says the duchess died heavily in debt and that the collection was sold to satisfy her creditors.⁶ The review of Tobin’s book reports instead that the duchess’s will stipulated the sale of her natural history and decorative art collections.³ What is certain is that the sale was held “By Order of the Acting Executrix,” as the title page says, beginning on Monday 24 April 1786 and running for thirty-seven further days, excepting Sundays and 5 June, the day on which the King’s birthday was kept.¹ The catalogue is usually attributed to Lightfoot; its preface calls its author only “the Compiler.”⁸¹

That preface is a short, candid essay on the problem of selling science. It insists that every item came from the duchess’s own collection and that nothing had been slipped in “from the Cabinets of others.” It notes that Linnaeus had not described a quarter of the objects in the museum, and that the duchess had intended every unknown species to be described and published, a plan cut short by the death of the naturalist she employed (a footnote names Dr. Solander) and then by her own.¹ It then explains why the shells were not sold in scientific order. A methodical arrangement would have pleased the man of science, the compiler admits, but “the Majority of the World are not Methodists. They love Variety more than Order,” and buyers would rather have twenty different cones in one lot than twenty of the same.¹

The lots follow that plan. The first day opened with boxes of shells and corals “for grottos,” a box of small shells sorted for making flowers, and then named specimens: a pair of Voluta vespertilio, a “High Admiral” cone marked rare.¹ The catalogue’s summary of each day’s sale shows shell days alternating with days of china, snuff boxes, coins, prints and cabinets.¹ The review of Tobin reports that about half the lots were shells and that some 1,700 catalogues sold before the sale began; it also passes on her account of crowds at the viewing.³

The printed lots end at number 4156, on the thirty-eighth day, Wednesday 7 June, given over to jewels and antiquities.¹ Lot 4155 was “The most celebrated antique Vase” from the Barberini cabinet at Rome, described in the catalogue as the urn that held the ashes of the emperor Alexander Severus, dug up under Pope Urban VIII.¹ That traditional story is the catalogue’s, not modern scholarship’s. This is the object now called the Portland Vase. A Victorian guide to London repeated John Timbs’s statement that the duchess had bought it from Sir William Hamilton for 1,800 guineas and that a Duke of Portland later deposited it in the British Museum, where it remains.⁹²

The lot count is not quite settled by the printed catalogue. According to the Mineralogical Record’s bibliography, the 3rd Duke added 107 uncatalogued lots from his own share of his mother’s collection, sold on a thirty-ninth day, 8 June. A separately printed Marked Catalogue, listing buyers and prices, accordingly counts 4,263 lots.⁸ The same source reports, from a nineteenth-century bibliographer, that the whole sale realized £11,546.⁸ Single shells could fetch high prices: the Cook Museum notes an imperial volute sold for £24 3s.⁶

What survived

The sale catalogue became, in effect, the publication the duchess had planned and never completed. Because Lightfoot used Solander’s names for species that had not been described before, several shells still carry names dated to 1786 and credited “Lightfoot in Solander,” such as the imperial volute, Voluta imperialis. The Cook Museum calls the catalogue the only published record of the collection.⁶

The shells themselves were dispersed among many buyers. The review of Tobin’s study reports her conclusion that of the thousands the duchess owned, only three can now be traced with any certainty.³ The house museum at Whitehall faded from memory too; by 1878 a guide to London could call it one of the “almost forgotten” features of the neighbourhood.⁹

What remains clearest is a picture of how such a collection worked. It needed a wealthy owner, trained naturalists paid to classify, a gardener who could find land snails, friends who made card trays, ships’ officers and dealers, and in the end an auctioneer. The 1786 catalogue records the last step, and its preface says plainly that the order the duchess and her naturalists had built was set aside so that the shells would sell.¹

Footnotes

1. A Catalogue of the Portland Museum (1786): title page, conditions of sale, preface, concise view of each day’s sale, first day’s lots, lots 4155-4156. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹

2. University of Nottingham, Manuscripts and Special Collections, biography of Margaret Cavendish-Bentinck. ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. Boreham, review of Tobin, The Duchess’s Shells (Cook’s Log, 2016). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

4. Delany, Autobiography and Correspondence, 2nd series, vol. 1 (1862): letters of 25 Aug. 1768, 24 Nov. 1768, 8 July 1770, 19 Nov. 1771. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

5. Delany, Autobiography and Correspondence, 2nd series, vol. 2 (1862): letters of 27 July 1778 (with editor’s note on Lightfoot) and 21 Sept. 1780. ↩ ↩² ↩³

6. Forgan, “Mrs. Bligh and her shells,” Cook Museum, Whitby (2024). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

7. Delany, Autobiography and Correspondence, 2nd series, vol. 3 (1862): letters of 19 Mar. 1781 and 19 May 1782 with editor’s notes; Mary Hamilton’s diary, Bulstrode, Dec. 1783; letters of July 1785. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

8. Schuh, Mineralogical Record bio-bibliography, “Portland, Margaret Cavendish H.H.B.” ↩ ↩² ↩³

9. Thornbury, Old and New London, vol. 3 (1878), “Whitehall: Precinct and gardens.” ↩ ↩²