Under such circumstances it is not surprising that his friends noticed with anxiety his changed appearance. His ruddy countenance became sallow and haggard. It grew, says his associate D’Ewes, to be of ‘a blackish paleness near to the semblance and hue of a dead visage.’ His somewhat portly frame stooped and waned. Life had still some charms for him,—so long at least as he could hope even faintly, for an opportunity of returning, at last, to his beloved studies. He was told of the growing repute of a certain Dr. Frodsham, who combined (it seems) experiments at the retort and still of the chemist, with the clinical practice of the physician,—when he could get it. Sir Robert sent for him and desired that he would bring a certain restorative balsam, or other nostrum, that had become the talk of the town. The worthy practitioner preferred to send his answer in writing. With great frankness, he said to his correspondent: ‘I have now an extraordinary occasion for money.... Neither is it my accustomed manner to distil for any body, without some payment beforehand. So, noble Sir, if pleas you, send here, by this berer, £17 and 12s., for so much the druges will cum tow. I confes that way I worke is deare, yett must say, upon my life, that I will make’ [you] ‘as sound and able of body, as at thirty-five,—and’ [this] ‘within five weeks.’ |MS. Harl., 7002, fol. 318; H. Frodsam to Sir R. Cotton (B. M.).| But the eye for which this naïve epistle was meant was an eye keen enough to detect the difference between corn and chaff. |Ib.| ‘I did,’ replied Sir Robert, ‘expect something of fact, to make me confident; before I could venture either my trial or my purse.... Promises I have often met and rejected. Error of judgment must be, to me, of more loss than the money.’
By way of addition to the combined anxieties of failing health, and of a bitter grief, there came now to be heaped upon Cotton’s shoulders the heavier burden of a conspiracy to assail his moral character.
Large as had been his expenditure on his noble collections, and openhanded as was his manner of life and of giving, Sir Robert Cotton was still wealthy. Some persons who had benefited by his repeated generosity thought they saw an opening, in the summer of 1630, to increase the gain by a clever and lucrative plot. The method they took reads, nowadays, less like a real incident in English literary biography, than like one of those—
The victim of this plot was now in his sixtieth year. Whatever may have been the sins of his youth, there was obvious risk in a contrivance to extort money by telling such a tale as that, about a man the fever of whose blood must needs have abated; even had he not been already broken down under cumulative weight of the sorrow and hunger of the heart. |The Conspiracy of Wilcox and Stevenson against Sir R. Cotton.| The intended victim, too, was a man with troops of friends. But the conspirators, it is evident, thought that Sir Robert’s known disgrace at Court would tell as a good counterpoise in their favour. A man already in circumstances of peril would, they thought, be likely to open his pursestrings rather than incur the burden of a new accusation.
On a June morning in 1630 Sir Robert Cotton received an urgent letter from an elderly woman—one Amphyllis Ferrers—who had the claim upon him of distant kinship, and upon whom, in that character, he had bestowed many kindnesses. The letter made a new appeal to his compassion; told him of the distresses of the writer’s daughter—married not long before to a needy man—and besought him to pay them a visit; that he might judge of their necessities with his own eyes. Both mother and daughter lived together in Westminster, at no great distance from Cotton House.
Sir Robert paid the invited visit; was told of various family plans connected with the recent marriage, and, amongst other things, of a pressing need for some household furniture. When the talk turned upon furniture, he was asked to look, himself, at an upstairs room, and form his own opinion about the request. Both mother and daughter went up with him; but the three had hardly entered the room, when a loud battering noise was heard on the other side of the thin wall which separated them from the neighbouring house. And, presently a still greater noise was heard from the rush of footsteps upon the stairs.
The daughter, it seems, was not in the plot. Her husband had ostentatiously ridden away from the door on the previous morning, to go into the country, for an absence of some days;—exactly like a hero in Boccaccio. At night, he quietly returned, and took up his abode, by preconcert with his neighbours, next door. In the morning he lay with those neighbours in ambush. When they all tumultuously rushed up stairs—into the man’s own abode—they were full of indignation at Sir Robert’s wantonness; but,—unfortunately for their story—in their eager haste they entered the room almost as soon as he himself had entered it, with his two companions. Nevertheless, they persisted in their accusation; permitting, however, when the first burst of virtuous wrath had somewhat subsided, the appearance of a sufficient indication that they were not wholly averse from listening to a reasonable proposal. There was a way, and one way only, in which that fierce wrath might be appeased. Sir Robert, however, was indignant in his turn. The purse of the intended victim remained stubbornly closed.
There is no need to pursue the unsavoury narrative. Nor would so much of the story have here been told, but for the suggestion which lies within it that the rapid breaking up of Sir Robert’s vigorous constitution was not perhaps due, quite exclusively,—as has been commonly believed[15]—to the malicious privation inflicted upon him by King Charles. For though he was successful in extracting, from the chief accuser himself, a confession of the falsehood of the charge, and an acknowledgment that the object of the conspirators was to extort money, yet the matter brought him much toil and vexation of spirit. One of the latest acts of his life was to arrange the proofs of the conspiracy in due and formal array.[16] |Cottonian Charters, &c., i, 3, seqq.; MS. Addit., 14049, ff. 21–43. (B. M.)| When he had done that, and had once again made an effort—as fruitless as the efforts which had been made before—for the recovery of his library, he seems to have prepared himself for death.
Sir Robert’s repeated efforts to regain his Library were not unseconded by friends powerful at Court. But the King’s stubbornness would not give way—till concession was too late. The Lord Privy Seal (the newly-appointed successor of Worcester, recently dead), was amongst those who interceded with Charles. |Cotton’s Death.| A little before Sir Robert’s death his Lordship sent to him John Rowland—one of his officers—to tell him that, at length, his mediation had been successful, and the King was reconciled to him. |Rowland, in Pref. to the Political Satire entitled Gondomar’s Transactions, &c.| Cotton answered, ‘You come too late. My heart is broken.’
Cotton, when he came to lie on the bed of death, had certain topics of reflection—of a secular sort—on which he might well look back with some measure of complacency. As a student of Antiquity he had been conspicuously successful. |Cotton’s Deathbed Reflections.| He had won the respect and reverence of every man in Europe who had proved himself competent to judge of such studies. And he had not been a selfish student. He had made his own researches and collections seed plots for Posterity. If, as a Statesman, he had missed his immediate aims more frequently than he had reached them, he had none the less rendered, on some salient occasions, brilliant public service. He had shewn, incontestably, that the true greatness of England lay near his heart.
One of his contemporaries presently said of him—when told of his death—‘If you could look at Sir Robert Cotton’s heart “My Library” would be found inscribed there;—just as Queen Mary said “Calais” was printed deeply on hers.’ But the character impressed on every volume of that large collection which he so loved is ‘England.’ To illustrate the history, and to enlighten the policy, of Englishmen was the object which made Cotton, from his youth, a Collector.
On the other hand, when the inevitable deathbed reflections passed from things secular to things sacred,—and also from Past to Future,—there was very little room for complacency of any sort. A few years before, when a better and more famous man than Cotton lay in like circumstances, this thought came into his mind:—‘Godly men, in time of extreme afflictions, did comfort themselves with the remembrance of their former life, in which they had glorified God. It is not so in me. I have no comfort that way. All things in my former life have been vain,—vain,—vain.’
Those words were among Sir Robert Cotton’s own early recollections. When he was sixteen years of age some of the dying words of Philip Sydney were repeated in almost every manor-house of England, and at many a cottage fireside. Those particular words came under his eye, at the most impressionable period of his life. The document which has handed them down to us was preserved by his care.[17] Did the exact thought they embody, and the very words themselves, come into his mind, as they well might, when he, too, lay upon his deathbed?
Be that as it may, such words in Sir Robert’s mouth would have had a special fitness. And he knew it well. Happily, he also knew where to look for comfort. He found it, just as Philip Sydney—in common with many thousands among the nameless Englishmen who had passed away in the interval between 1586 and 1631—had found it before him. He could say, as Sydney said:—
Not long before he died, Cotton said to a friend (after a long conference which he had held with Dr. Oldisworth, a Divine who spent many hours, from day to day, at his bedside) such comfort as I would not want, to be the greatest monarch in the world.’ |The last Scene.| Bishop Williams—who passed the greater part of the last night in conversation with him—remarked, as he went his way in the morning, ‘I came to bring Sir Robert comfort, but I carry away more than I brought.’ To the last, however, the ruling passion of Cotton’s nature asserted itself. He could forgive his persecutors, but he could not shake off the memory of the bitterness of the persecution. Turning to Sir Henry Spelman, he said: ‘Tell the Lord Privy Seal, and the rest of the Council, that their so long detaining my books from me has been the cause of this mortal malady.’ Spelman gave his message, and the ‘Lord Privy Seal’ himself hastened to Sir Robert’s bedside to express his regrets. The interview was narrated to Charles, and presently the Earl of Dorset was sent, from the King himself. The new comforter came half an hour too late. The persecuted man had passed to his rest. He died, trusting in the one, only, all-sufficient, Saviour of sinful men. His death occurred on the 6th of May, 1631. |John Pory to Sir Thomas Puckering; MS. Harl., 7000, fol. 310.| His body was removed to Conington, and was interred with more than the usual demonstrations of respect. The inscription on his monument is printed at the end of this chapter.
When Lord Dorset, on his arrival at Cotton House with the royal message, found that Sir Robert was already dead he turned to the heir. If the Earl has been truly reported, the terms in which he expressed his master’s condolence and good wishes were ill-chosen: ‘To you, His Majesty commanded me to say that, as he loved your father, so he will continue his love to yourself.’ |Pory to Sir T. Puckering, as above.| The comfort of the promise could not have been great. Sir Thomas’ experiences of the rubs of life were, however, to come chiefly from the King’s opponents; not from the King.
His life was a quiet one, up to the time of the outbreak of Civil War. Until then, its most notable incidents grew out of the circumstance that it fell to his lot to serve as Sheriff of Huntingdonshire, during the busy year of ‘Shipmoney.’
Sir Thomas Cotton was in no danger of being tempted to follow the example of Hampden. The readiness with which he discharged the troublesome task of collecting the impost throughout his county probably laid the first foundation of a strong feeling of personal ill-will towards him, on the part of the lower class of the adherents of the Parliament, during subsequent years. He never ranged himself with the King’s party. Neither would he take any prominent part on the side of the Parliament. He had little taste for public life; and regarded the quarrel with the aloofness of spirit natural to a man with no dominant political convictions, and with a decided love for country sports and for the pleasures of domesticity.
He had sat in Parliament (for Marlow) during his father’s lifetime, and in his father’s company. His correspondence shows considerable talent. The extensive portion of that correspondence—in the years 1636 and 1637—which was imposed on him by the Shipmoney business, shews also considerable power of dealing with official details, little as he could have liked them. It exhibits an anxiety to acquit himself conscientiously of a difficult duty, and not to shirk any of the incidents of duty merely on account of their distastefulness. In the ‘Short Parliament’ of 1640 he sat as member for his own county. He does not seem to have sought for any seat in the memorable Parliament which followed.
His troubles began in 1644. Much to his disgust he was appointed to be one of the ‘Committee of Sequestrations’ for Huntingdonshire. The duty was one which any English gentleman might well have disliked without incurring the reproach either of idleness or of undue fastidiousness. Sir Thomas’ repugnance to the work was backed by a repugnance, not less keen, to those who would fain have been his fellows in its performance.
‘This County of Huntingdon’—so he writes not long after his own nomination to an ungenial office, which he refused to accept on the ground of an illness, that was far from being feigned for the occasion—‘is in an unhappy condition by Sequestrators. Only four or five men, of mean reputation and estate, are “Committees;” and they act (all of them) as Judges, Jury, and Executioners.’ His own experience was destined to become a pregnant comment on that pithy text.
His avoidance of all share in the task of punishing, by fine and imprisonment, those of his old friends and country neighbours who thought that the duty of loyalty to the Crown was still a duty, however glaring the faults of the man who, for the time, wore the Crown, was the primary offence given by Sir Thomas Cotton to the busy patriots who would fain have had him work with them as a fellow-sequestrator. His illness (as I have said) was doubtless real enough; but he also disliked the work, and took no pains to conceal his dislike. Medical advisers told him that Bedfordshire—where he also had property—was a better county than Huntingdonshire for a man who suffered from chronic ague and low fever. But Sir Thomas needed no adviser to tell him that, under the existing circumstances of the country and the times, Eyworth would be a much more satisfactory abode than Conington for a quiet-loving man who had other duties than those of a soldier, who abhorred civil war with all his soul, and who ardently desired such a solution of the current issues as would neither make the King a mere dependent on his Parliament, nor make the Parliament an absolute ruler over the kingdom. Sir Thomas went into Bedfordshire. Lady Cotton continued to abide at Conington. Very soon after his departure she received a summons, addressed to her husband, and couched exactly in these words: ‘You are assessed eight hundred pounds, according to an Ordinance of Parliament. |1643. 16 August.| The King and Parliament hath present use of these monies. Therefore, we pray you, send it up to us at Huntingdon on Saturday next.’ Before the receipt of this very summary ‘assessment’ many of Sir Thomas Cotton’s horses, with a good deal of farm produce and other property, had been already seized, by measures more summary still. Meanwhile Sir Thomas had committed no act of delinquency; he had simply removed himself into another county. Payment was refused.
The sequel of the story depicts, in small, what was then passing at large over much of the length and breadth of England. The farmers on the Conington estate were told, in the plainest of words, that if they did not pay their rents ‘to us at Huntingdon,’ their moveables would be seized and themselves treated as ‘delinquents.’ Execution, in those days, followed hard on process; and little difference was made, either in word or deed, at the farms and at the manor-house. On one morning, Lady Cotton was visited in her bedchamber—before she could dress—by five troopers, who, under her own eyes, broke open her drawers and trunks, and carried off what they thought meet. On another, one of Sir Thomas’ confidential servants received a similar visit; had his papers rifled in a like fashion, and his apparel stolen. At the stables and out-offices scarcely any three days passed, during the entire summer of 1643—from May to August—without some raid or other for plunder. For much of this there was scarcely the semblance or the pretext of a legal warrant. During those saturnalia of ‘liberty’ there was, virtually, no judge in England, and not a few men did whatsoever seemed good in their own eyes.
Sir Thomas Cotton was old enough to remember the early stages of the long conflict of which—in 1643—this was seemingly the upshot. In the Parliament at Oxford he had sat beside his father and his father’s friends. His correspondence at this time—so far as it appears to have survived—deals merely with the passing events. It contains, I think, no disclosure of any reflections which may have crossed his mind on the principles which underlay them. He was probably shrewd enough to see already that the grossness of the current abuses of popular power carried with it no scintilla of valid blame upon the first leaders in that conflict—the real issues of which were still far off. What he, in common with so many of the best gentlemen in England, was now smarting under was the consequence rather of the royal triumphs of Charles’ earlier years, than of the royal defeats of his later years. Had the policy of Robert Cotton and of John Eliot prevailed a quarter of a century sooner, there would (very probably) have been no county committees of sequestrators; no political scaffolds at Whitehall; no ruling of England by brute force under artificers suddenly transformed into generals; no wholesale massacres in Ireland, fraught with mischief for the whole empire during centuries to come.
Be that however as it may, things were not yet at so bad a pass, but that a curb could, now and then, be put on the necks of such busy patriots as those who sat in perpetual Committee at Huntingdon. Redress was impossible; seeing that the plunder was dissipated almost as fast as it was made. But, in Sir Thomas Cotton’s case, it was found practicable to put a check on its progress. He invoked the aid of a powerful friend, Henry, Earl of Manchester, who represented the authority of the Parliament in Huntingdonshire. The Earl summoned the Sequestrators to show cause for their raids on Conington. He held a court. The new functionaries were brought—after some ineffectual bluster—to confess that they knew of no act done by Cotton which brought him within purview of the Parliamentary Ordinance, nor of any other legal cause to subject him to sequestration. As the words of confession were on the lips of one active Committee-man, another functionary blurted out—most felicitously—‘You are wrong. |Proceedings in the Sequestration of the Estate of Sir T. Cotton; MS. Addit., 5012, ff. 34, seqq.| Master Serjeant Wilde wished it should be done.’ And, in the sequel, ‘Master Serjeant’ proved to be strong enough to protract the inquiry, and even to procure its adjournment to London; though his attempt to maintain the sequestration—on a plea the falsehood of which was conclusively proved—came at last to be entirely foiled.
When Sir Thomas Cotton came to sum up his losses he found that they amounted to more than four thousand pounds (in the money of that day). |Ib., ff. 71, seqq.| ‘They have had,’ he wrote, ‘£1500, in money; besides eleven horses, worth £140; Billeting at Conington, Eyworth, and other places, which came to £100; spoil made at Sawtrey and at St. Germans which £300 will not make good; and besides the decay of my rents to an amount of at least £600 a-year; ... and now the layers and taxes will take up the whole of Ladyday’s rent.’ |Ib., 74.| Meanwhile his unlucky tenants, in Huntingdonshire alone, had been deprived of a hundred and ninety horses, and their farms had been stripped both of provisions and of forage.
By way of pleasant diversity to his troubles in Huntingdonshire and Bedfordshire Sir Thomas received, presently, a letter from John Selden—the old and warmly-attached friend of his family—warning him that the capabilities of Cotton House in London had caught the eye of certain other Committee-men, and had made a deep impression on them. |The Attempt to seize on Cotton House.| They saw that it would do capitally both as a lodging house for the entertainment of distinguished strangers who might come to Westminster, to wait on the Parliament, and as a State prison for very eminent delinquents. These watchful Committee-men were also members of the Council of State; and the time had now come when King James’ sarcastic and well-remembered jest—‘Bring me sax chairs, for I see sax kings approaching’—was turning itself into a very awkward fact. These Committee-men, too, (like their humbler fellows at Huntingdon,) had their Serjeant at hand to give them advice on elastic points of law. ‘Serjeant Dendy,’ wrote Selden, ‘fairly told me that the Committee and Council were informed that, by the Patent under which you claim, it was provided that your interest [in Cotton House] should cease, during the time of the Parliament.’ |Selden to Sir T. Cotton; in an Appendix to Cotton MSS. marked ‘16. l.’ fol. 50 (B. M.)| Certainly, an awkward clause to appear in a man’s lease, in days when a Parliament, beginning its ‘time’ in 1641 had not quite ended it until 1660. This claim of the Council of State proved, in the sequel, to have in it no more of real validity than had that other claim to procure the Conington rents to be paid ‘to us at Huntingdon’; but, like that, it gave Sir Thomas Cotton a good deal of annoyance before he succeeded in getting quit of it.
It is much to his honour that petty but cumulative misfortunes like these did not sour Sir Thomas Cotton’s temper. When quieter times came, he showed himself the worthy son of his eminent father, both by the improvement of his library, at considerable charge, and by the liberality with which he lent his choicest manuscripts, and, in many ways, made them and his other collections serviceable to literature. The still extant acknowledgments of service of this sort from historians and great scholars are very numerous.[19]
By his first marriage with Margaret Howard, daughter of William Lord Howard of Naworth, Sir Thomas had one son and two daughters. By his second marriage with Alice Constable he had four sons, two of whom died without issue. Alice was the daughter and sole heir of Sir John Constable of Dromondley in Yorkshire, and the relict of Edmund Anderson of Eyworth and of Stratton in Bedfordshire, and she brought with her a considerable dowry.
Sir John Cotton, the eldest son of the first marriage, sat in Parliament for the borough of Huntingdon in the reign of Charles the Second, and for Huntingdonshire in that of James the Second. But he took no prominent part in public affairs. Like his father he was twice married. And his first wife became step-daughter as well as daughter-in-law to his father, being Dorothy, daughter and heir of Edmund Anderson of Eyworth above mentioned. His second wife was Elizabeth Honywood. He seems to have resembled his father both in his tastes for a quiet country life, and in the liberality with which he allowed (on reasonable cause and to proper persons) access to his library. Nor did Sir John, any more than Sir Thomas, escape animadversion, when he allowed himself to form his own judgment of the fitness or the timeliness of any particular application. |Autobiog. and Corresp., vol. ii, p. 40.| |History of the Reformation, vol. iii, Introd., p. 8. (Edit. of 1714.)| Caustic Symonds D’Ewes writes down Sir Thomas Cotton as ‘unworthy to be master of so inestimable a library.’ Caustic Bishop Burnet writes in his turn of Sir John Cotton: ‘A great Prelate had possessed him with such prejudices against me that ... he desired to be excused’ [from granting Burnet admittance to the Cottonian Library] ‘unless the Archbishop of Canterbury or a Secretary of State would recommend me as a person fit to have access.’ Against strictures such as these, it were easy, but is not needful, to adduce a score of acknowledgments of deep obligation, from writers more eminent by far than either D’Ewes or Burnet.
The eldest son (also John) of Sir John Cotton, by his wife Dorothy, did not live to inherit either the famous library or the ancestral estates. He died in 1681, and his later days seem to have been marked by some stormy incidents. In one point, his troubles resembled those which disturbed the last year of his great-grandfather’s life;—in so far as that they were caused by a lady. But whereas Sir Robert had the lady thrust upon him, to suit the purposes of other men, the misfortunes of his great-grandson appear to have grown out of an ardent but illicit passion—as ardently, and not less illicitly, returned by its object. Some scraps of their correspondence which have chanced to be preserved read, after two centuries of dusty repose, as if they were still all aflame with that fierce love which an experienced poet describes as ‘passion’s essence.’[20]
Sir John Cotton survived till nearly the close of the seventeenth century. He was succeeded in the baronetcy and estates by John, the son of the last-mentioned John Cotton, who had married Frances, daughter and heir of Sir George Downing of East Hatley in Cambridgeshire. Sir John, fourth baronet, married Elizabeth Herbert, one of the grand-daughters of Philip, Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery. Like his ancestors of many generations, this Sir John Cotton sat in Parliament for Huntingdonshire. His chief claim to honourable memory is that he settled the Cottonian Library on the British nation for ever, and thus made its founder, Sir Robert, the virtual and first Founder of the British Museum. This was done by Act of Parliament, in the year 1700.
This eminent public benefactor died, in 1731, without surviving issue. The baronetcy then reverted to Robert the eldest son of the second marriage of the first Sir John Cotton, grandson of the Founder. From Sir Robert, fifth baronet, the dignity came, in 1749, to a fourth ‘John Cotton’ who then became sixth baronet and who was the last surviving male heir of his honoured line.
Sir John had lost his only son—a fifth John—many years before his accession to the baronetcy, which, on his own death (27 March, 1752), became extinct. Conington had long previously passed to a younger son of Sir Thomas Cotton, second baronet; as shown in the following—
The reader who glances at this pedigree will notice that some of the Cottons of 1600–1750 were as fortunate in getting heiress-wives as had been their foregoers of preceding centuries. But their possessions were scattered almost as rapidly as they had been augmented. Conington, which was the most valued possession of Sir Robert, was less prized by his descendants. The Council Books show that some of its appendant manors and members—notably Glatton and Hulme—gave to the Founder himself a good deal of trouble. The Sequestration Books show the anxieties and losses which the busy Parliamentarians of Huntingdonshire inflicted on his next successor. Other circumstances tended also to bring the place into disfavour with owners who had a choice of seats. It lay so close to the great northern road, as to be exposed to undue demands alike from the movement of troops and from the tramping of professional vagrants. Nor was it less exposed, from its situation, to injuries by great floods. |Desertion of the old Seat of Conington.| Long before the extinction of the male line, Conington was deserted, in favour of more attractive abodes in southern counties. We learn from a passage in Stukeley’s Itinerary that the house was fast becoming a ruin, even in the reign of George the First; although it had been solidly rebuilt by Sir Robert himself.
‘I thought it,’ writes that antiquary, ‘a piety to turn half a mile out of the road, to visit Conington the seat of the noble Sir Robert Cotton,—where he and Camden have often sat in council upon the Antiquities of Britain, and where he had a choice collection of Roman inscriptions picked up from all parts of the kingdom. I was concerned to see a stately old house of hewn stone, large and handsome, already falling into ruin.’[22]
By the Statute which established the Cotton Library as a national institution, it was enacted as follows: ‘The Cottonian Library ... shall be kept and preserved, in the name and family of the Cottons, for public use and advantage. |The Establishment Act of 1700.| And therefore, according to the desire of the said Sir John Cotton, and at his request, the said Mansion House, ... and also all the said Library, ... together with all the Coins, Medals, and other rarities, ... shall be vested in Trustees ... with a perpetual succession.’ The first Trustees were the Lord Chancellor Somers, Mr. Speaker Harley (afterwards Earl of Oxford), and the Lord Chief Justice, ex officio; together with Sir Robert Cotton, of Hatley St. George, Cambridgeshire; Philip Cotton, of Conington; Robert Cotton of Gedding, in Cambridgeshire, and William Hanbury, of the Inner Temple. |12 & 13 Will. III, c. 7.| It was provided that on the decease of any one of the four family trustees the heir male, for the time being, of Sir Robert Cotton, the founder, should appoint a successor.
The furious party-spirit which at this time divided the country into hostile camps, the leaders of which were at any moment ready to fly at each other’s throats, was eminently unfavourable both to the guardianship and to the growth of the new institution; as it was, indeed, to all matters of learning or of mental culture. Hardly seven years had passed before it was found necessary to pass ‘An Act for the better securing of Her Majesty’s purchase of Cotton House in Westminster.’
This Act recites that since the preceding enactment of 1700 ‘very little had been done in pursuance thereof to make the said Library useful to the Public, except what had been lately done at Her Majesty’s charge;’ and that the place wherein the Library then was, being ‘a narrow little damp room, was improper for preserving the books and papers.’ The Act then proceeds to declare that an agreement had been made for the purchase of Cotton House for £4,500, ‘to the intent that it might be in Her Majesty’s power to make this most valuable collection useful to her own subjects, and to all learned strangers.’
Within five years, however, this unfortunate Library had to be removed from Cotton House to Essex House, in the Strand (1712); and thence again, in 1730, to Ashburnham House, at Westminster (already containing the Royal collection), where it had not long been lodged, when the fire occurred by which it was so seriously injured. |The Fire at Ashburnham House.| The account which the Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry gave to the Public, shortly after the occurrence of this calamity, runs thus:
‘On Saturday morning, October 23, 1731, a great smoke was perceived by Dr. Bentley, and the rest of the family at Ashburnham House, which soon after broke out into a flame. It began from a wooden mantel-tree taking fire which lay across a stove-chimney that was under the room where the MSS. of the Royal and Cottonian Libraries were lodged, and was communicated to that room by the wainscoat and by pieces of timber, that stood perpendicularly upon each end of the mantel-tree.’
‘They were in hope, at first,’ continues the Committee, ‘to put a stop to the fire by throwing water upon the pieces of timber and wainscoat, ... and therefore did not begin to remove the books so soon as they otherwise would have done. But, the fire prevailing, Mr. Casley, the Deputy Librarian, took care in the first place to remove the famous Alexandrian MS. and the books under the head of Augustus’ [twelve of the Cottonian presses, it will be remembered, were adorned by the heads of the twelve Cæsars, whence the still existing designations or press-marks, as for instance, that of the famous Evangeliary of King Ethelstan, Nero D. vi, mentioned on page 132] ‘in the Cottonian Library, as being esteemed the most valuable amongst the collection. Several entire presses, with the books in them, were also removed; but ... several of the backs of the presses being already on fire, they were obliged to be broke open, and the books, as many as could be, thrown out of the windows.’ All the MSS. that were saved, and the remains of what been burnt, were removed to the Dormitory of Westminster School.
At the time of this disastrous fire, the number of MS. volumes was 958. Of this number 114 were reported to be ‘lost, burnt, or entirely spoiled; and 98 damaged so as to be defective.’ Mr. Speaker Onslow took immediate measures, in conjunction with Dr. Bentley and Mr. Casley, for the examination of the burnt MSS., and for the repair of such as were then deemed alone reparable. Three months afterwards the Record Clerk to whom the task was more particularly committed, thus reports his progress: ‘One hundred and upwards,’ he says, ‘being volumes of Letters and State Papers, have been quite taken to pieces, marked, and bound again.’ |Report of the Committee appointed to view the Cottonian Library (1732), pp. 11–15; and Casley’s Appendix thereto.| But he laments that ‘there having no way hitherto been found out to extend vellum and parchment that has been shrivelled up and contracted by fire to its former dimensions, part of several of the vellum MSS. must remain not legible, unless the desideratum can be supplied.’
For nearly a century some of the most precious of the injured MSS. remained as the fire had left them. But in 1824, by the care of Mr. Forshall, the then Keeper of the MSS. in the British Museum, a commencement was made towards their restoration, which his successor, Sir F. Madden, zealously and successfully continued. Nearly three hundred volumes have been repaired, and more or less completely restored, (a considerable number of which were previously regarded as beyond all hope of recovery) to a state of legibility.[23]
The calamity of 1731 brought about what may, in a sense, be termed a partial compensation, by inducing Major Arthur Edwards to make an important bequest, with the view of precluding its recurrence. |The bequest of Arthur Edwards.| Owing to the protraction of a life interest in the legacy—the terms of which will be cited in describing that eventual Act of Incorporation which created the British Museum—it did not become available until other arrangements had made its application to building purposes needless. It was, consequently, and in pursuance of the Testator’s contingent instructions, appropriated to the purchase of books in the manner, and with results, which will be spoken of in a subsequent chapter. Major Edwards also bequeathed his own collection of about 2,000 volumes of printed books, by way of addition to the Cottonian Library of MSS. These, however, were not actually incorporated with the Museum collections until the year 1769.
For several years, Bentley conjoined the Keepership of the Cottonian with that of the Royal Library. His predecessors in the office were Dr. Thomas Smith (hitherto the only biographer of the Founder,) and William Hanbury, who had married a descendant of the Founder. |The Keepers of the Cottonian Library.| Dr. Smith was less eminent as a scholar—though his learning was great—but far more estimable as a man, than was his successor in the Keepership, the imperious and covetous Master of Trinity. For conscience sake, Smith had given up both a good fellowship and a good living, at the Revolution. Literature profited by the loss of Divinity. He died in May, 1710. Hanbury—by a very undesirable plurality—was a Trustee as well as Keeper. That he was not, in either capacity, strictly faithful to the spirit of the Trust confided to him seems to be established by incidents which I find recorded in the MS. Diary of Humphrey Wanley. The reader will observe that it is possible to reconcile Wanley’s statement with the supposition that the MSS. alienated had never actually been made part of the Cottonian Library, though it is as plain as sunlight that a really faithful trustee would have made them part of it. As it turned out, the sale of them did no actual and eventual mischief. On December 2nd, 1724, says Wanley, ‘I had a conversation with Mr. Hanbury, who owned that he hath still in his possession many original and valuable papers given him by his wife’s brother, Sir John Cotton, which now lie in different places. These papers and whatever else happens to be among them—as books, rolls, &c.—he hath agreed to put into my hands for my Lord’s [Oxford’s] use. |Wanley’s Diary, MS., ii, 40 (B.M.).| I have promised that he shall be very well paid and considered for the same.’
Wanley had already recorded a previous visit in which Hanbury had delivered ‘for my Lord Oxford’s use, a small but curious parcel of old letters,’ adding: ‘I believe he expects a gratuity for them.’ On the last day of December he received another parcel; and on the 4th January, 1725, he again writes: ‘Mr. Hanbury gave me another parcel of letters written to Sir Robert Cotton.’
Without endorsing the violent diatribe of Lord Oxford (the second of the Harleian Earls) against Hanbury’s successor—as the almost wilful destroyer of part of the Cotton MSS.—it must be admitted that there is conclusive evidence that neglect of duty on Dr. Bentley’s part was a moving agent in the disaster. Under his nominal keepership the practical duties of Cottonian Librarian were discharged by an industrious and otherwise meritorious deputy, David Casley.