Henry had died intestate. The library which he had purchased from the Executors of Lord Lumley fell to the disposal of the King. The greater part of it went to augment the remains of the old royal library of England, portions of which had been scattered during James’ reign, as well as before it. By that disposal of a collection, in which the prince had taken not a little delight during his brief possession, he became virtually, and in the event, a co-founder of the British Museum.
The library remained at St. James’ under the charge, for a time, of the prince’s librarian, Edward Wright. The relics of the royal collection at Whitehall were then in the keeping of the eminent scholar and theologian, Patrick Young. Eventually they too were brought to St. James’, and Young took the entire charge. It was by his exertions that the combined collection was augmented by a valuable part of the library of Isaac Casaubon. |Roe, Negotiations, pp. 335; 618.| It was to his hands that Sir Thomas Roe delivered the ‘Alexandrian Manuscript’ of the Greek Bible, the precious gift to King Charles of Cyril Lucar, Patriarch of Constantinople.
Young survived until 1652, but he was deprived of his office in 1648. In that turbulent time the library narrowly escaped two perils. Some of the soldiers of the triumphant party sought to disperse it, piecemeal, for their individual profit. Some of the leaders of that party formed a scheme to export it to the Continent for a like purpose. It stands to the credit of a somewhat fanatical partisan—Hugh Peters, one of the many men who are doomed to play in history the part of scapegoats, whatever their own sins may have really been—that his hasty assumption of librarianship (1648) saved the library from the first danger. |Comp. Order-Book of Council of State, vol. v, p. 454, and vol. xxiv, p. 604. (R. H.)| A like act on the part of Bulstrode Whitelocke, in the following year (July, 1649), saved it from the second. Probably, it was at his instance that the Council of State made or designed to make it a Public Library. |Whitelocke’s Embassy to Sweden, vol. i, p. 273. (Reeve’s edit.)| Four years afterwards, Whitelocke held at Stockholm a curious conversation with Queen Christina about its manuscript treasures, of some of which, he tells us, she was anxious to possess transcripts.
Under the Commonwealth, the librarianship had been combined, first with the keepership of the Great Seal, and then with an Embassy to Sweden. Under the Restoration, it was held in plurality with an active commission in the Royal Navy. |Acquisition of the Theyer Library.| Charles II, however, caused some valuable additions to be made to the library. Of these the most important was the manuscript collection which had belonged, successively, to John and Charles Theyer. The sum given was £560. The collection came to St. James’ Palace in 1678. It was rich in historical manuscripts and in the curiosities of mediæval science. It embraced many of the treasured book-possessions of a long line of Abbots and Priors of Llanthony,[29] and the common-place-books of Archbishop Cranmer.
At Charles the Second’s death the number of works in the royal collection had increased to more than ten thousand. No doubt, in that reign, the books could have brought against their owner the pithy complaint to which Petrarch gave expression, on behalf of some of their fellows, at an earlier day: ‘Thou hast many books tied in chains which, if they could break away and speak, would bring thee to the judgment of a private prison.... |Petrarch, De remediis utriusque fortunæ.| They would weep to think that one man—ostentatious of a possession for which he hath no use—should own a host of those precious things that many a passionate student doth wholly lack.’
No true lover of books, for their own sake, indeed, was ever to possess that rich collection, until it passed into the ownership of the nation. Its entail, so to speak, as a heirloom of the Crown, was cut off, just as it was about to pass into the hands of the one English King who alone, of all the Monarchs since Charles the First, cared about books. That it should pass to the Nation had been proposed by Richard Bentley, when himself royal librarian, sixty years before the proposal became a fact. ‘’Tis easy to foresee,’ said Bentley, ‘how much the glory of our Nation will be advanced by erecting a Free Library of all sorts of books.’ In his day, he saw no way to such an establishment, otherwise than by transfer of the royal collection.
There is a reasonable, perhaps it might be said a strong, probability that when Bentley gave expression to this wish, at the close of the seventeenth century, he was unconsciously reviving one among many projects for the public good which had been temporarily buried in the grave of Prince Henry. For under the Commonwealth, the Library at St. James’ had been ‘Public’ rather in name than in fact.
When the time came, the number of volumes of the Royal Collection which remained to be incorporated with the Museum of Sloane and with the Library of Sir Robert Cotton was somewhat more than twelve thousand. The number of separate works—printed and manuscript together—probably exceeded fifteen thousand.
Amongst the acquisitions so gained by the nation the first place of honour belongs to the Codex Alexandrinus. It stands, by the common consent of biblical palæographers, in a class of manuscripts of the Holy Scriptures into which only two or three other codices in the world can claim to be admitted. Of early English chronicles there is a long series which to their intrinsic interest as primary materials of our history add the ancillary interest of having been transcribed—sometimes of having been composed—expressly for presentation to the reigning Monarch. Here also, among a host of other literary curiosities, is the group of romances which John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, caused to be compiled for Margaret of Anjou; and the autograph Basilicon, written for Prince Henry. Among the innumerable printed treasures are choice books which accrued as presentation copies to the sovereigns of the House of Tudor, beginning with a superb series of illuminated books on vellum, from the press of Anthony Verard of Paris, given to Henry the Seventh. For large as had been the losses sustained by the original royal library, and truly as it may be said that Prince Henry’s acquisitions amounted virtually to its re-foundation, many of the finest books of long anterior date had survived their varied perils. And some others have rejoined, from time to time, their old companions, after long absence.
The royal collection has also an adventitious interest—in addition to the main one—from another point of view. It includes results of the strong-handed confiscations of our kings, as well as of the purchases they made, and the gifts they received. Both the royal manuscripts and the royal printed books contain many memorials of careers in which our poets no less than our historians have found, and are likely to find, an undying charm.
‘The English nobles are high-spirited, active, educated men, born to wealth and power, who have run through every country and have kept, in every country, the best company; have seen every secret of art and nature; and—when men of any ability or ambition—have been consulted in the conduct of every important action. You cannot wield great agencies without lending yourself to them. When it happens that the spirit of the Earl meets his rank and his duties, we have the best examples.... These are the men who make England that strong-box and Museum it is; who gather and protect works of art, dragged from amidst burning cities and revolutionary countries, and brought hither, out of all the world.... When I saw that, besides deer and pheasants, these men have preserved Arundel Marbles, Townley Galleries, Howard and Spencer Libraries, Warwick and Portland Vases, Saxon Manuscripts, Monastic Architectures, and Millenial Trees, I pardoned their high park-fences.’—
Political Exile and Foreign Travel under Elizabeth, and under James.—Life of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel.—The Consolations of Connoisseurship.—Vicissitudes of the Arundel Museum.—The gifts of Henry Howard to the Royal Society.
The Collector of the Arundel Marbles and Founder of the Arundel Library was the great-grandson of that twenty-first Earl of Arundel (Henry Fitzalan) by whom had been collected the choicest portion of the library which passed, in 1609, from the possession of John, Lord Lumley, to that of Henry, Prince of Wales. |chap. iii, p. 162| That Earl had profited by the opportunities which the dissolution of the monasteries presented so abundantly to collectors at home. The new Earl profited, in his turn, by larger and far more varied opportunities, offered to him during a long course of travel abroad. For himself, his travels ripened and expanded a somewhat crude and irregular education. He attained, at length, and in a much greater degree (as it seems) than any of his contemporaries, to that liberal culture which enabled him to appreciate, and to teach his countrymen to appreciate, the arts from which Greece and Italy had derived so much of their glory; whilst in England those arts had, as yet, done very little either to enhance the enjoyments and consolations of human life, or to call into action powers and aptitudes which had long lain dormant. It is not claiming too much for the Earl of Arundel to say that of whatever, upon a fair estimate, England may be thought to owe to its successful cultivation of the Arts of Design, he was the first conspicuous promoter. Nor is his rank as a pioneer in the encouragement of the systematic study of archæology—a study so fruitful of far-reaching result—less eminent.
He may also be regarded as setting, by the course he took with his own children, the fashion of foreign travel, as a necessary complement of the education of men of rank and social position. The example became very influential, and in a sphere far broader than the artistic one. Under Elizabeth, the Englishmen best known on the Continent had been political exiles. Most of them were men self-banished. Many of them passed their lives in defaming and plotting against the country they had left. The jealous restrictions upon the liberty of travel imposed by the Government rarely kept at home the men of mischief, but were probably much more successful in confining men whose free movements would have been fruitful in good alike to the countries they visited and to their own. The altered circumstances which ensued upon the accession of James notoriously gave facilities to wider Continental intercourse; and it was by men who followed very much in Lord Arundel’s track that some of the best social results of that intercourse were won.
Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, Surrey, and Norfolk, was twentieth in lineal descent from that William de Albini who, in the year 1139, had acquired the Castle and Earldom of Arundel by virtue of his marriage with the widow of King Henry the First. He was born at Finchingfield, in Essex, in 1585,—a date which nearly marks the period of lowest depression in the strangely varied fortunes of an illustrious family. |Thomas, D. of Norfolk to his son Philip, &c., MS. Harl., 787.| Philip, Earl of Arundel, the father of Earl Thomas, was already in the Tower, and was experiencing, in great bitterness, the truth of words written to him by his own father, when in like circumstances:—‘Look into all Chronicles, and you shall find that, in the end, high degree brings heaps of cares, toils in the State, and most commonly (in the end) utter overthrow.’ Before Thomas Howard had reached his fifth year his mother—co-heiress of the ‘Dacres of the North’—had to write to the Lord Treasury Burghley: ‘Extremytye inforceth me to crave succour,’ and to illustrate her assertion by a detail of miseries.
The hopes with which the Stuart accession was naturally anticipated by all the Howards, were by some of them more than realized, but the heir of Arundel was not of that number. He was, indeed, restored in blood to such honours as his father, Earl Philip, had enjoyed, and also to the baronies forfeited by his grandfather, Thomas, Duke of Norfolk, in 1572. But the dignities were restored without the lands. His nearest relations profited by their influence at Court to obtain grants of his chief ancestral estates. The Earls of Nottingham, Northampton,[30] and Suffolk had each of them a share in the spoil;—salving their consciences, probably, by the reflection that, despite his poverty, their young kinsman had made a great marriage. For his alliance, in 1606, with Lady Aletheia Talbot, daughter and co-heir of Gilbert, Earl of Shrewsbury, had already brought to him considerable means in hand, and a vast estate in prospect. The marriage, in higher respects, was also a happy one. But a natural and eager desire to recover what his father had forfeited cast much anxiety over years otherwise felicitous. He could not regain even Arundel House in London, until he had paid £4000 for it to the Earl of Nottingham.
Lord Arundel made his first appearance at Court in 1605. In May, 1611, he was created a Knight of the Garter. Thirteen years of James’ reign had passed before the Earl was admitted to the Privy Council. This honour was conferred upon him in July, 1616. Five years more were to pass before his restoration to his hereditary office of Earl Marshal of England, although he had been made one of six Commissioners for the discharge of its duties in October, 1616. The baton was at length (29th August, 1621) delivered to him at Theobalds. |Domestic Corresp., James I, 1621, 21 July. (R. H.)| ‘The King,’ wrote John Chamberlain to Sir Dudley Carleton, when communicating the news, ‘would have given him £2000 a year pension withal, but—whatsoever the reason was—he would accept but the ordinary fee, which is twenty pounds per annum.’ It is plain, however, that this assertion was an error. According to the ancient constitution of the Earl Marshal’s office there were certain fees accruing from it which were now, under new regulations, to cease. The question arose, Shall the Earl Marshal be compensated by pension, or (according to a pernicious fashion of the age) by the grant, or lease, of a customs duty upon some largely vended commodity? |Minutes of Correspondence in Sec. Conway’s Letter Book; (R. H.) and Council Books (C. O.).| The ‘impost of currants’ was eventually fixed upon. But the Earl had subsequent occasion to adduce evidence before a Committee of the Privy Council, that the rent paid to the King sometimes exceeded the aggregate duty collected from the merchants.[31]
There is some uncertainty as to the date of the earliest of Lord Arundel’s many visits to the Continent. According to Sir Edward Walker, he was in Italy in 1609. But that statement is open to doubt. There is proof that in 1612 he passed some time in Florence and in Siena. With Siena, as a place of residence, he was especially delighted. Of the foundation of his collections—to which his Italian journeys largely contributed—there are no distinct records until the following year.
The tour of 1613, followed immediately upon the marriage of the Princess Elizabeth with Frederick, Count Palatine of the Rhine. The royal pair were escorted into Germany by both Lord and Lady Arundel, who soon left the Rhine country on a new visit to Italy, and remained there until nearly the close of 1614. |Beginnings of the Arundelian Collections.| During that long residence the Earl established a wide intercourse with the most distinguished artists and archæologists of Italy, and made extensive purchases. The fame of his princely tastes was spread abroad. It soon became notorious that by this open-handed collector marbles, vases, coins, gems, manuscripts, pictures, were received with equal welcome. And from this time onwards many passages occur in his correspondence which indicate the keen and minute interest he took in the researches of the agents who, in various parts of the Continent, were busy on his behalf. The pursuit did not lack the special zest of home rivalry, as will be seen hereafter.
Not the least singular incident in the early part of Lord Arundel’s life was his commitment to the Tower, at a moment when his favour with King James was at its height.
In one of the many impassioned parliamentary debates which occurred during the session of 1621 an allusion was made by Lord Spencer to the unhappy fate of two famous ancestors of the Earl of Arundel, and it was made in a way which induced the Earl to utter an unwise and unjust retort. The matter immediately under discussion was a very small one, but it had grown out of the exciting question of monopolies, and it was mixed up with the yet more exciting question of the overweening powers entrusted by the King to Buckingham. In the course of an examination at the bar of the House of Lords about the grant of a patent for licensing inns, Sir Henry Yelverton had made a furious attack upon the Duke. The attack was still more an insult to the House, than to the King’s favourite, and it had been repeated. It was proposed, on a subsequent day, to call Yelverton to the bar for the third time, in order to see if he would then offer the apology which before he had refused. Arundel opposed the motion. ‘We have his words; we need hear no more,’ he said. Lord Spencer rose to answer: ‘I remember that two of the Earl’s ancestors—the Earl of Surrey, and the Duke of Norfolk, were unjustly condemned to death, without being heard.’ The implied parallel was a silly one, but its weakness and irrelevancy did not restrain Arundel’s anger. ‘My Lords,’ said he, ‘I do acknowledge that my ancestors have suffered. It may be for doing the king and the country good service; and at such time, perhaps, as when the ancestors of the Lord that spake last kept sheep.’ The speaker failed to see that by using such words he had committed exactly the same offence as that for which he had, but a moment before, censured the late Attorney-General, and had moved the House to punish him. On all sides, he was advised to apologise. He resisted all entreaty. When committed to the Tower, he still refused submission. Both the King and the Prince of Wales had to intercede for him with the House before he could regain his liberty.
With rare exception, the public incidents of Lord Arundel’s life during the remainder of the reign of James are such as offer little interest, save as illustrations of character. In that respect, many of them testify to the failing which appears so strikingly in the story of the quarrel with Lord Spencer. Some noble qualities lost part of their real lustre when pride was so plainly seen in their company. All that was best in Lord Arundel revolted at the grossness of the Stuart court. He often increased his own disgust by contrasting what he saw at Whitehall with the memories of his youth. His office of Earl Marshal precluded him from very long absences. Sometimes, when forced to mingle with courtiers for whose society he had little liking, he rebuked their want of dignity by exaggerating his own dignity into haughtiness. Against failings of this kind we have to set many merits, and amongst them a merit eminently rare in that age. Arundel was free from covetousness—save in that special sense in which covetousness, it may be feared, cleaves to all ‘collectorship.’
In 1622 some anxiety was occasioned to Lord Arundel by a singular adventure which befell his wife during her residence in the Venetian territory, whither (in the course of a long Italian tour) she had gone to watch over the education of their sons; little anticipating, it may well be supposed, that her name and that of Lord Arundel, would be made to figure in Venetian records in connection with the strange story of the conspirator Antonio Foscarini.
After making some stay in Venice, Lady Arundel had taken a villa on the Brenta, about ten miles from the City.
In April, 1622, she was on her way from this villa to the Mocenigo Palace, her residence in Venice, when she was met by the Secretary of Sir Henry Wotton, English ambassador to the Republic. The secretary said that he was sent by the ambassador to inform her that the Venetian Senate had resolved to command her ladyship to leave their city and territory within a few days, on the ground of a discovery that Foscarini had carried on some of his traitorous intrigues with foreign ministers—and more especially with those of the Pope and Emperor—at her house. |1622, April.| To this the messenger added, that it was Sir Henry Wotton’s most earnest advice that Lady Arundel should not return to Venice, but should remain at Dolo, until she heard from him again. Having listened to this strange communication in private, she desired the secretary to repeat it in the presence of some of the persons who attended her. Then she hastened to the ambassador’s house at Venice. Her interview with Wotton is thus, in substance, narrated by Lord Arundel, when telling the story to his friend the Earl of Carlisle, then ambassador to the Court of France.
‘Lady Arundel went immediately to my Lord Ambassador [Wotton], telling him she came to hear from his own mouth what she had heard from his servant’s.’ When Sir Henry had repeated the statement of his secretary, the Lady asked him how long the accusation and the resolution of the Senate had been known to him. He replied that reports of the alleged intercourse with Foscarini had reached him some fifteen days before, or more; but that of the resolution of the Senate he had heard only on that morning. ‘She asked him why he did never let her understand of the report all that time? He said because she spake not to him of it.’ To Lady Arundel’s pithy rejoinder that it would have been hard for her to speak of a matter of which she had never heard the least rumour until that day, and to her further protestation that she had not even seen Foscarini since the time of his visit to England, some years earlier, Sir Henry replied, ‘I believe there was no such matter;’ but he refused to disclose the name of the person who had first spoken to him of the accusation. To his renewed advice that her ladyship should not stir farther in the matter, she declined to accede. |MS. Addit., 4176, § 156. (B. M.)| It concerned her honour, and her husband’s honour, she said, to have public conference with the Doge and Council without delay. From carrying out this resolve the ambassador found it impossible to dissuade her.
That conference took place on the following day with the remarkable result of a public declaration by the Doge that no mention had ever been made of Lady Arundel’s name, or of the name of any person nearly or remotely connected with her, either at any stage of the proceedings against Foscarini, or in any of the discussions which had arisen out of his conspiracy.
When the audience given to Lady Arundel by the Doge had been made the subject of a communication to the Senate, that body instructed the Venetian Ambassador in England to confer with Lord Arundel. |Deliberations of the Senate of Venice; printed by Hardy, in Report on Venetian Archives, pp. 78–84 (1866).| ‘You are,’ said they, ‘to speak to the Earl Marshal in such strong and earnest language that he may retain no doubt of the invalidity of the report, and may remain perfectly convinced of the esteem and cordial affection entertained towards him by the Republic; augmented as such feelings are by the open and dignified mode of life led here by the Countess, and in which she hastens the education of her sons in the sciences to make them—as they will become—faithful imitators of their meritorious father and their ancestors.’
Sir Henry Wotton’s motive in the strange part taken by him in this incident is nowhere disclosed. He had to listen to several indirect reproofs, both from the Doge and from the Senate, which were none the less incisive on account of the courtly language in which they were couched.
Two years afterwards, the Earl was himself hastily summoned to the Continent to attend the death-bed of his eldest son, James, Lord Maltravers, who is described by a contemporary writer as a ‘gentleman of rare wit and extraordinary expectation.’ |Death of Arundel’s eldest son.| The Countess and her two elder sons, James and Henry, were then returning from Italy to England. |Royal license to travel, July, 1624.| They passed through Belgium in order to visit the Queen of Bohemia. Whilst at Ghent, upon the journey, Lord Maltravers was seized with the smallpox. He died in that city in July, 1624. The affliction was acutely felt. |Domestic Corresp. James I, vol. cxlix, § 67; vol. clii, § 55.| ‘My sorrow makes me incapable of this world’s affairs,’ wrote the Earl to one of his political correspondents, in the autumn of the year. To the outer world, reserved manners and a stately demeanour often gave a very false impression of the man himself. Throughout his life, Arundel’s affectionate nature was so evinced in his deeds, and in his domestic intercourse, as to stand in little need of illustration from his words. Mainly, as it seems, to this characteristic quality he was soon to owe a second imprisonment in the Tower of London.
The new Lord Maltravers shortly after his return to England fell in love with the Lady Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of Esme, Duke of Lennox. Arundel had formed other wishes and plans for the son who was now his heir, and there is evidence that he was reluctant to give his consent to the prosecution of the suit. Nor did the kinship of the prospective bride with King Charles appear to him, it seems, at all an inviting circumstance in the matter. So long as Buckingham stood at the helm of affairs Arundel was likely to have a very small share in the new king’s affections, so that pride and policy as well as inclination stood in the way of his approval. He knew also that it was Charles’ eager wish that his kinswoman should marry Lord Lorne, the eldest son of the Earl of Argyle. But the young lover was ardent, and his entreaties unintermitting. At length, we are told, he not only wrung from the Earl the words ‘You may try your fortune with the lady that you seem to love so well,’ but prevailed upon him to confer paternally on the subject with the lady’s aunt and guardian, the Duchess of Richmond. Maltravers, meanwhile, had resolved to incur no risk of defeat by waiting for a royal assent to his marriage. He had long before won his cause with the lady, but had kept the secret. Two passionate lovers[32] went gravely through the ceremony of a formal introduction to each other.
Maltravers then induced her to consent to a private marriage. When Lord Arundel was informed of the fact he immediately disclosed his knowledge to the King, and besought pardon for the culprits. But Charles’ wrath was unbounded. He placed the new-married pair under restraint in London. He committed Arundel himself to the Tower. He commanded Lady Arundel to remain at Horsley, in Surrey, a seat belonging to the Dowager Countess, her mother-in-law.
When Lord Arundel was thus imprisoned Parliament was sitting. The Lords declared his arrest to be an infringement of their privileges. The King replied that ‘the Earl of Arundel is restrained for a misdemeanour which is personal to the King’s Majesty, and has no relation to matters of Parliament.’ The Lords still insisted that it was the Earl’s unquestionable right ‘to be admitted to come, sit, and serve in Parliament.’ Charles released Arundel from the Tower, and then confined him to Horsley. Royal evasion did but provoke increased earnestness and firmness from the Peers. At length they resolved that they would suspend public business until the Earl presented himself in his place. |Secretary Conway’s Letter Book, pp. 251 seqq. (R. H.)| Nearly three months had been spent in debate and altercation before Secretary Conway was directed to write to Arundel in these terms: ‘It is the King’s pleasure that you come to the Parliament, but not to the Court.’
The sequel of the story, as it tells itself in the State Papers, affords an early and eminent illustration of the qualities in Charles the First which, as they ripened, brought about his ruin. The King resolved that his concession should as far as was possible be retracted. Directly the sitting of Parliament was suspended, the King commanded Conway to apprise the Earl that his restraint to Horsley was renewed, ‘as before the Earl’s leave to come to Parliament.’ |Domestic Corresp., Charles I, vol. xxxv, p. 16 (R. H.).| Arundel on his part made courtly and even lavish declarations of submission. ‘I desire to implore the King’s grace by the humblest and best ways I can.’ This was written in September, 1626. Whenever it was indispensable that he should obtain leave to visit the capital a petition had to be prepared. In March, 1627, he writes: ‘The King has limited my stay in London until the 12th of March. I will obey, but I beg you to represent to His Majesty that I have necessary business to transact ... and that I have so carried myself as to shew my desire to give His Majesty no distastes. If now, after a year has passed, the King will dissolve this cloud, and leave me to my own liberty, I will hold myself to be most free when living in such place and manner as may be most to His Majesty’s liking.’ It was all in vain. Another whole year passes. Arundel has still to write: ‘I beseech the King to give life to my just desires, and after two years of heavy disfavour to grant me the happiness to kiss his hands and to attend him in my place.’ To this humble representation and entreaty it was replied by Secretary Conway: ‘His Majesty’s answer is that the Earl has not so far appeased the exceptions which the King has taken against unkindness conceived, as yet to take off his disfavour. |Ibid., vol. lvi, p. 86; vol. xcv, pp. 51, 85, &c. Conway’s Letter Book, pp. 295, &c. (R. H.)| As for the Earl’s proffered duty and carriage in the King’s service, the King will judge of that as he shall find occasion.’
He found occasion ere long; but not until after Buckingham’s death. Arundel rendered useful service, on some conspicuous occasions, both at home and abroad. If his successive diplomatic missions to Holland in 1632, and to Ratisbon in 1638, on the affairs of the Palatinate, failed of their main object, it was from no miscarriage of the ambassador. In the unostentatious labours of the Council Board he took during a long series of years a very honourable share. And it is much to his honour that by the men to whom the chief scandals of a disastrous reign are mainly ascribable, Arundel was, almost uniformly, both disliked and feared.
As Lord High Steward of England, Arundel had to preside at the trial of the Earl of Strafford. He acquitted himself of an arduous task with eminent ability, and with an impartiality which won respect, alike from the managers of the impeachment and from the friends of the doomed statesman. The only person who expressed dissatisfaction with Arundel’s conduct on that critical occasion was the King. The historians who have most deeply and acutely scanned the details of that most memorable of all our State Trials are agreed that in order to have satisfied Charles, the Earl of Arundel must have betrayed the duty of his high office.
Shortly after the trial of Strafford, it became Arundel’s duty as Earl Marshal to attend the mother of the queen (Mary of Medicis), on her return to Holland; and he received the King’s license to remain beyond the seas during his pleasure. |Latest Employments.| He returned however to England in October of the same year. |Rushworth, vol. iv, pp. 317, 318.| In the following February, a similar ceremonial mission was his last official employment. He then conducted Queen Henrietta Maria on her journey into France, and took his own last farewell of England. |1642. February.| It was an unconscious farewell. |Sir E. Walker, in MS. Harl., as before.| Nor does his departure appear to have been dictated by any desire to shrink from sacrifices on behalf of the cause with which—whether rightly or wrongly—all his personal sympathies, as well as the political views of his whole life, were bound up. At the hands of the first Stuart he had met with capricious favour, and with enduring injustice. By the second, during several years, he was treated with marked and causeless indignity; and then, during several other years, rewarded grudgingly for zealous service. In exile, his contributions in support of the royal cause were upon a scale which impoverished both himself and his family.[33]
Such a fact is a conclusive proof of magnanimity of spirit, whatever may be thought of its bearings in regard to political insight. |Colonizing Efforts of Lord Arundel.| Opinion is less likely to differ with respect to exertions of quite another order which occasionally occupied Lord Arundel’s mind and energies during at least twenty years of his political life.
One of the best known incidents in his varied career is also one of its most honourable incidents. His friendship for Ralegh grew out of a deep interest in colonization. And the calamitous issue of that famous voyage to Guiana in 1617 which Arundel had promoted was very far from inducing him to abandon the earnest advocacy of a resumption, in subsequent years, of the enterprise which Ralegh had had so much at heart. His efforts were more than once repeated, but the same influences which ruined Ralegh foiled the exertions of Arundel and of those who worked with him.
He then turned his attention towards the wide field of colonial enterprise which presented itself in New England. From the autumn of 1620 until the summer of 1635 he, from time to time, actively supported the endeavours of the ‘Council for the Planting of New England.’ |Proclamation Book, May 15, 1620. (R. H.)| The Minute in which that Council summed up the causes which induced it, at the date last-named, to resign its charter is an instructive one. |Surrender of the New England Charter.| It expresses, in few words, the views of Lord Arundel and of his ablest fellows at the board:—‘We have found,’ say the Councillors, in their final Minute, ‘that our endeavours to advance the plantation of New England have been attended with frequent troubles and great disappointments. We have been deprived of near friends and faithful servants employed in that work. We have been assaulted with sharp litigious questions before the Privy Council by the Virginia Company, who had complained to Parliament that our Plantation was a grievance.’ They proceed to say that a promising settlement which had been established, under the governorship of Captain Gorges in Massachusetts Bay, had been violently broken up by a body of speculative intruders who, without the knowledge of the Council of New England, had found means to obtain a royal ‘grant of some three thousand miles of the sea-coast.’ Finding it by far too great a task, for their means, to restore what had thus been brought to ruin, Arundel, and his fellow-councillors were constrained to resign their charter.
Four years later the Earl formed an elaborate plan for the colonization of Madagascar. But the events of 1639–40 soon made its effectual prosecution hopeless.
The latest notice we have of the Earl of Arundel, from the hand of any eminent contemporary, occurs in the Diary of John Evelyn, and is dated six months before the Earl’s death. |Death at Padua, 1646.| In June of the preceding year (1645) Evelyn had paid a visit to Lord Arundel at his house in Padua, and had then accompanied him to a famous garden in that city known as the ‘Garden of Mantua.’ |Evelyn, Diary, vol. 1, p. 212.| They had also explored together some ancient ruins lying near the Palace of Foscari all’ Arena. When Evelyn renewed his visit in March, 1646, the Earl was no longer able to leave the house. |Ibid., pp. 218, 219.| ‘I took my leave of him,’ says the diarist, ‘in his bed, where I left that great and excellent man in tears, on some private discourse of crosses that had befallen his family, particularly the undutifulness of his grandson, Philip, turning Dominican friar; and the misery of his country, now embroiled in civil war. He caused his gentleman to give me directions, written with his own hand, what curiosities I should inquire after in my journey; and so—enjoyning me to write sometimes to him—I departed.’ The Earl died at Padua on the 24th September, 1646, having entered into the sixty-second year of his age. In compliance with the directions of his Will his remains were brought to England and buried at Arundel.
It remains only to add a few particulars of the character and sources of the splendid collections which the Earl of Arundel, by the persistent labours and the lavish expenditure of more than thirty years, had amassed. The surviving materials for such an account are, however, very fragmentary. |Notices of the Arundelian Collections.| Those which are of chief interest occur in the correspondence which passed between the Earl and Sir Thomas Roe during the embassy of that eminent diplomatist to the Ottoman Porte in the years 1626–1628.
The Earl’s zeal as a collector, and the public attention which his personal successes in that character during his Italian travels had soon attracted, naturally excited a like ambition on the part of several of his contemporaries. Conspicuous in this respect were his brother-in-law the Earl of Pembroke, and his political rival and enemy the Duke of Buckingham. Arundel’s success in amassing many fine pictures had, in like manner, already attracted the attention of Prince Charles to that peculiarly fascinating branch of collectorship.