Lives of the Founders of the British Museum, Part 1 of 2 / With Notices of Its Chief Augmentors and Other Benefactors, 1570-1870.

Chapter I.

Introduction.

II.

The Founder of the Cottonian Library.

III.

The Collectors and Augmentors of the Old Royal and Public Library at St. James’.

IV.

The Collector of the Arundelian MSS.

V.

The Collector of the Harleian Manuscripts.

VI.

The Founders of the Sloane Museum.

... “The reverence and respect your Petitioners bear to the memory of the most learned Sir Robert Cotton are too great not to mention, in particular, that from the liberal use of his Library sprang (chiefly) most of the learned works of his time, for ever highly to be valued. The great men of that age constantly resorted to and consulted it to shew the errors and mistakes in government about that period. And, as this inestimable Library hath since been generously given and dedicated to the Public use for ever, to be a National Benefit, your Petitioners presume that no expression of gratitude can be too great for so valuable a treasure, or for doing honour to the Memory and Family of Sir Robert Cotton.”—‘Petition to the Honourable House of Commons from the Cottonian Trustees’ (drawn up antecedently to the Foundation Act of the British Museum); 1752.

Chronological Epochs in the Formation of the British Museum.

In two particulars, more especially, our great National Museum stands distinguished among institutions of its kind. The collections which compose it extend over a wider range than that covered by any other public establishment having a like purpose. And, if we take them as a whole, those collections are also far more conspicuously indebted to the liberality of individual benefactors. |The Public debt to private Collectors.| In a degree of which there is elsewhere no example, the British Museum has been gradually built up by the munificence of open-handed Collectors, rather than by the public means of the Nation, as administered by Parliament, or by the Governments of the day.

The real founders of our British Museum have been neither our British monarchs nor our British legislators, as such. They have been, commonly, individual and private British subjects; men loyal both to the Crown and to the People. Often, they have been men standing in direct lineal descent from the great Barons who dictated the Charter of our liberties, in the meadow near Windsor, and from those who led English knights and English bowmen to victory, on the wooded slopes near Poitiers. Sometimes, they have been men of very lowly birth; such as could point to no ancestral names appended to Magna Charta, or to the famous letter written from Lincoln to Boniface the Eighth; such as may, indeed, very well have had ancestors who gave their lives, or their limbs, for England at Poitiers or at Cressy, but who certainly could point to no heraldic memorials of feats of arms done on those bloody fields of France. Not a few of them, perhaps, would have been vainly asked to tell the names of their grandfathers. One boast, however, is common to both of these groups of our public benefactors. They were men who had alike a strong sense of gratitude to those who had gone before them, and a strong sense of duty to those who were to come after them. To nearly all of the men whose lives will be told in this volume are applicable, in a special sense, some words of Julius Hare:—‘They wrought in a magnanimous spirit of rivalry with Nature, or in kindly fellowship with her.... |J. & A. Hare, Guesses at Truth, vol. ii, p. 18.| When they planted, they chose out the trees of longest life—the Oak, the Chestnut, the Yew, the Elm,—trees which it does us good to behold, while we muse on the many generations of our Forefathers, whose eyes have reposed within the same leafy bays.’ They were men whose large impulses and deep insight led them to work, less for themselves than for their successors. It is by dint of what men of that stamp did—and did, not under the leading of the Gospel according to Adam Smith, but of a Gospel very much older than it—that upon us, whose day is now passing, Posterity, so to speak, ‘has cast her shadow before; and we are, at this moment, reposing beneath it.’ Of Public Benefactions, such as those which this volume very inadequately commemorates, it is true, with more than ordinary truth, that we owe them, mainly, to a generous conviction in the hearts of certain worthies of old days that they owed suit and service to Posterity. This may, indeed, be said of public foresight, when evidenced in material works and in provisions to smooth some of the asperities of common life and of manual toil. But it may be said, more appropriately still, of another and a higher kind of public foresight;—of that evidenced in educational institutions, and in the various appliances for raising and vivifying the common intellect; for enlarging its faculties; diffusing its enjoyments; and broadening its public domain. As it has been said (by the same acute thinker who has just been quoted) in better words than any of mine:—‘The great works that were wrought by men of former times; the great fabrics that were raised by them; their mounds and embankments against the powers of evil; their drains to carry off mischief; the wide fields they redeemed from the overflowings of barbarism; the countless fields they enclosed and husbanded for good to grow and thrive in; ... all this they [mainly] achieved for Posterity.... |J. & A. Hare, Guesses at Truth, vol. ii, p. 13.| Except for Posterity; except for the vital magnetic consciousness that while men perish, Man survives, the only principle of prudent conduct must have been, “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.”’

The pages which follow have been written in the belief that they afford—whatever the defects of their Writer—useful illustrations of this great and pregnant truth. To him it has not been given to work ‘for Posterity,’ otherwise than as a Chronicler of some of the workings of other men. But he owns to a special delight in that humble function. Its charm,—to his mind,—is enhanced, on the present occasion, by the very fact that so much of the work now about to be narrated is the work of men who only rarely have been labouring with other means, or with other implements, than those which were personal to themselves, as individuals.

In the chief countries of the Continent of Europe—on the other hand—great national Museums have, commonly, had their origin in the liberality and wise foresight either of some sovereign or other, or of some powerful minister whose mind was large enough to combine with the cares of State a care for Learning. In Britain, our chief public collection of literature and of science originated simply in the public spirit of private persons.

The British Museum was founded precisely at that period of our history when the distinctively national, or governmental, care for the interests of literature and of science was at its lowest, or almost its lowest, point. As regards the monarchs, it would be hard to fix on any, since the dawn of the Revival of Learning, who evinced less concern for the progress and diffusion of learning than did the first and second princes of the House of Hanover. As regards Parliament, the tardy and languid acceptance of the boon proffered, posthumously, by Sir Hans Sloane, constitutes just the one exceptional act of encouragement that serves to give saliency to the utter indifference which formed the ordinary rule.

Long before Sloane’s time (as we shall see hereafter), there had been zealous and repeated efforts to arouse the attention of the Government as well to the political importance as to the educational value of public museums. Many thinkers had already perceived that such collections were a positive increase of public wealth and of national greatness, as well as a powerful instrument of popular education. It had been shewn, over and over again, that for lack of public care precious monuments and treasures of learning had been lost; sometimes by their removal to far-off countries; sometimes by their utter destruction. Until the appeal made to Parliament by the Executors of Sir Hans Sloane, in the middle of the eighteenth century, all those efforts had uniformly failed.

But Sir Hans Sloane cannot claim to be regarded, individually or very specially, as the Founder of the British Museum. His last Will, indeed, gave an opportunity for the foundation. Strictly speaking, he was not even the Founder of his own Collection, as it stood in his lifetime. The Founder of the Sloane Museum was William Courten, the last of a line of wealthy Flemish refugees, whose history, in their adopted country, is a series of romantic adventures.

Parliament had previously accepted the gift of the Cottonian Library, at the hands of Sir John Cotton, third in descent from its Founder, and its acceptance of that gift had been followed by almost unbroken neglect, although the gift was a noble one. |(T. Carte to Sir Thomas Hanmer, Speaker of the House of Commons; Hanmer Corresp., p. 226.)| Sir John, when conversing, on one occasion, with Thomas Carte, told the historian that he had been offered £60,000 of English money, together with a carte blanche for some honorary mark of royal favour, on the part of Lewis the Fourteenth, for the Library which he afterwards settled upon the British nation. It has been estimated that Sloane expended (from first to last) upon his various collections about £50,000; so that, even from the mercantile point of view, the Cotton family may be said to have been larger voluntary contributors towards our eventual National Museum than was Sir Hans Sloane himself. That point of view, however, would be a very false, because very narrow, one.

Whether estimated by mere money value, or by a truer standard, the third, in order of time, of the Foundation-Collections, that of the ‘Harleian Manuscripts,’—was a much less important acquisition for the Nation than was the Museum of Sloane, or the Library of Cotton; but its literary value, as all students of our history and literature know, is, nevertheless, considerable. Its first Collector, Robert Harley, the Minister of Queen Anne and the first of the Harleian Earls of Oxford, is fairly entitled to rank, after Cotton, Courten, and Sloane, among the virtual or eventual co-founders of the British Museum.

Chronologically, then, Sir Robert Cotton, William Courten, Hans Sloane, and Robert Harley, rank first as Founders; so long as we estimate their relative position in accordance with the successive steps by which the British Museum was eventually organized. But there is another synchronism by which greater accuracy is attainable. Although four years had elapsed between the passing—in 1753—of ‘An Act for the purchase of the Museum or Collection of Sir Hans Sloane, and of the Harleian Collection of Manuscripts, and for providing one general repository for the better reception and more convenient use of the said Collection, and of the Cottonian Library and of the additions thereto,’ and the gift—in 1757—to the Trustees of those already united |The Old Royal Library, formed by Prince Henry (son of James I) at St. James’.| Collections by King George the Second, of the Old Royal Library of the Kings his predecessors, yet that royal collection itself had been (in a restricted sense of the words) a Public and National possession soon after the days of the first real and central Founder of the present Museum, Sir Robert Cotton. But, despite its title, that Royal Library, also, was—in the main—the creation of subjects, not of Sovereigns or Governments. Its virtual founder was Henry, Prince of Wales. It was acquired, out of his privy purse, as a subject, not as a Prince. He, therefore, has a title to be placed among the individual Collectors whose united efforts resulted—after long intervals of time—in the creation, eventually, of a public institution second to none, of its kind, in the world.

Prince Henry’s story is not the least curious of the many life-stories which these pages have to tell. That small span of barely eighteen years was eventful, as well as full of promise. And it may very fitly be told next, in order, after that of Cotton, who was not only his contemporary but his friend.

As the Royal Library was, in a certain degree, a Public Collection before the foundation of the Museum, so also was the Arundelian Library of Manuscripts. It did not become part of the British Museum until nearly eighty years after the amalgamation of the Cottonian, Harleian, Sloanian, and Royal Collections into one integral body. But the munificent Earl who formed it had often made it public, for the use of scholars, in his own lifetime. One or two of his descendants allowed it to fall into neglect. Before it left old Arundel House, in the Strand, it was exposed, more than once, to loss by petty thefts. But when, by another descendant, the injury was repaired, and the still choice collection given—at the earnest entreaty of another of our English worthies, John Evelyn—to the Royal Society, the Arundelian MSS., like the Library at Saint James’ Palace, became (so far as a circle of literary men and of the cultivators of scientific inquiry were concerned) a public possession. Many of the Arundelian marbles had also become—by other acts of munificence worthy of the time-honoured name of Howard—to the Public at large, and without restriction, ‘things of beauty,’ and ‘joys for ever.’ Others of them, indeed, are—even in these days—shut up at Wilton with somewhat of a narrow jealousy of the undistinguished multitude. But, by the liberality of the Dukes of Marlborough, the choice gems gathered by the Earl of Arundel during his long travels on the Continent, and his widespread researches throughout the world, have long been made available to public enjoyment, in more ways than one. The varied narrative of that famous Collector’s life may, perhaps, not unfitly be placed next after that of the best of the Stuart princes. Arundel, like Henry, was the friend of Sir Robert Cotton, and was proud of that distinction.

Undoubtedly, there is more than one point of view from which we may regard the preponderating share borne by private collectors in the ultimate creation of our national repository as matter of satisfaction, rather than matter of shame. It testifies to the strength amongst us—even at times deeply tinged with civil discord—of public and patriotic feeling. Nor is this all. It testifies, negatively, but not less strongly, to a conscientious sense of responsibility, on the part of those who have administered British rule in conquered countries, and in remote dependencies of the Crown. Few readers of such a book as this are likely to be altogether unacquainted with national museums and national libraries which have been largely enriched by the strong hand of the spoiler. Into some such collections it is impossible for portions of the people at whose aggregate expense they are maintained to enter, without occasional feelings of disgust and humiliation. There are, it is true, a few trophies of successful war in our own Museum. But there is nothing in its vast stores which, to any visitor of any nationality whatever, can bring back memories of ruthless and insolent spoliation.

That narrowness of conception, however, which has made some publicists to regard the slenderness of the contributions of the Nation at large, when contrasted with the extent of those of individuals, as if it were a cause for boasting, is visibly, and very happily, on the decline. It is coming to be recognised, more implicitly with every year that passes, that whatever can be done by the action of Parliament, or of the Government, for the real promotion of public civilisation,—in the amplest and deepest meaning of that word,—is but the doing of the People themselves, by the use of the most effective machinery they have at hand; rather than the acceptance of a boon conferred upon them, extraneously and from above.

If that salient characteristic in the past history of our British Museum is very far from affording any legitimate cause of boasting to the publicist, it affords an undeniable advantage to the narrator of the history itself. It not only broadens the range of his subject, by placing at its threshold the narrative of several careers which will be found to combine, at times, romantic adventure and political intrigue with public service of a high order; but it binds up, inseparably, the story of the quiet growth of an institution in London with occasional glimpses at the progress, from age to age, of geographical and scientific discovery, of archæological exploration, and of the most varied labours for the growth of human learning, throughout the world.

As an organized establishment, the British Museum is but little more than a century old. The history of its component parts extends over three centuries. That history embraces a series of systematic researches,—scientific, literary, and archæological,—the account of which (whatsoever the needful brevity of its treatment in these pages) must be told clumsily, indeed, if it be found to lack a very wide and general interest for all classes of readers—one class only excepted.