Studies from Court and Cloister Part 27

On the 1st November the work of restoration began, and was carried out by Bentley, Casley, three clerks from the Record Office, a bookbinder, and others. The Speaker of the House of Commons was frequently present.

Some of the MSS. inclined to mildew were dried before a fire. Some would have rotted if they had not been taken out of their bindings, so thoroughly had the water permeated. The paper books which had received stains were taken to pieces and plunged into the softest cold water that could be procured, and when the stains disappeared they were put into alum and water, and then hung upon lines to dry.

The best means of stretching vellum to its original dimensions, after it has been shrivelled and contracted, had not at that time been discovered, but the restorers did what they could. It was first softened in cold water, then those leaves, which had become glued together by the heat melting all kinds of extraneous matter, were separated by means of an ivory cutter, and the glutinous substances carefully removed with the fingers, the parchments smoothed with the palm of the hand, and their backs pressed with a clean flannel.

Fragments were also carefully cleaned and preserved, and upon many of these with which the original restorers could do nothing, Sir Frederick Madden afterwards worked wonders. By his method, 100 volumes were repaired on vellum, and 97 on paper.

Among these mutilated fragments was the priceless fourth century ma.n.u.script of Genesis, Otho, B 6, which was thought to have been taken abroad as it could not be found after the fire. For a while it was given up as irrevocably lost, but Sir Frederick Madden discovered the much burnt remains and pieced them together. This Book of Genesis was at one time thought to be the oldest Greek MS. in England. It is now known that the four leaves of the gospel in Greek, t.i.tus, C 15, are as old or even older. The Oxford librarian, Thomas James, wrote in the beginning of the volume that it was brought into this country by two Greek bishops as a present to Henry VIII. They told him that according to an old tradition it had belonged to Origen, and there was nothing in the text to make the supposition incredible. This, if true, would carry the ma.n.u.script back 1500 years at least, with a possibility of its being much more ancient. It had been the subject of a dispute in the time of the first Sir John Cotton, when it was supposed to have been lost. All at once it was discovered in the possession of Lady Stafford, who stoutly maintained that it had belonged to the late earl, her husband, who had lent it to Sir Thomas Cotton; and that while it was in his hands he caused it to be newly bound, and his coat of arms fixed upon it. She said, however, that Sir John might have it for 40 pounds, but that she would not take a farthing less, adding that he had already offered her 30 pounds in her own house, but that she had refused the sum. Mr. Gilbert Crouch, who was negotiating for Sir John, in explaining the matter to Dugdale, said that if Sir John Cotton had "so great a mind to the book, he were better give this other 10 pounds than run the charge and hazard of a suit."*

* Life, Diary, and Correspondence of Sir William Dugdale.

All that now remains of this uniquely beautiful MS., painted on every page, are eighteen melancholy sc.r.a.ps of no use but as a monument of the ingenuity with which they have been pieced together, mended, and preserved.

The Chronicle of Wendover, which was also believed to have perished, was found and repaired in the time of Sir Frederick Madden.

A fragment of another MS., marked as missing in Planta's catalogue, has found its way to the Bodleian library. It consists of ten folios of the Life of St. Basil, and a note by Hearne says that it came from a Cottonian MS.

Grand and imposing as the Cottonian library still is, it is painful to consider how incomparably finer it must have been during the life of its founder, before it suffered from the ravages of the fire, and from the carelessness or dishonesty of so many borrowers. Sir John Cotton avowed that many books lent to Selden were never returned; the Duke of Buckingham was also guilty in the same respect. A ma.n.u.script now in the Bodleian library (Barlow 49) was borrowed from the Cottonian by Dr.

Prideaux, and never returned. It was afterwards exposed for sale at Worcester, and bought by Dr. Barlow, who presented it to the Bodleian.

Parliamentary rolls often suffered a like fate, and instances of similar losses could be largely multiplied. The loss of the Utrecht Psalter is, however, perhaps the most grievous that the library has sustained from borrowers.

Some of the ma.n.u.scripts, injured by the fire at Ashburnham House, were further mutilated by another fire which occurred on the premises of a bookbinder on the 10th July 1865.

In 1753 the government purchased the large Natural History and Art Collection of Sir Hans Sloane, together with a library of 50,000 volumes, which were deposited in Montague House, Bloomsbury, on the site of the present British Museum Buildings. Hither the Cottonian and Royal libraries were brought, forming, together with the Sloane ma.n.u.scripts, the nucleus of the great national collections of which we are justly proud, and which, under their present efficient and courteous management, are rendered so useful to students.

The British Museum was formally opened to the public at Montague House in 1759. But it grew so rapidly that soon more s.p.a.ce was needed, and in 1823 the eastern wing of the present building was erected to receive the library of George III. presented to the museum by George IV. The whole building was completed in 1847.

V. THE ROYAL LIBRARY

The Royal library is in many ways the most splendid of our national ma.n.u.script collections. Had it been fortunate enough, like the Harleian library, to number a Wanley among its custodians and biographers, the history of its formation would read like a fairy-tale. But, unhappily, we have to depend for our chief data on what Casley, the "dry as dust"

pay excellence of librarians could tell us, and though his knowledge of the age of MSS. was admirable, he was remarkably uncommunicative regarding their pedigree, meagre in his descriptions, and apparently insensible to paleographic beauty. There is scarcely, in the whole British Museum, a less satisfactory book than his catalogue of the Royal library. Thus, the student is hampered by the want of a guide, and must hew paths for himself through the luxuriant growth and acc.u.mulations of many centuries. In point of mere size, the Royal library ranks third among the four great collections acquired by the British Museum at the time of its foundation--the Harleian numbering 7639 MSS.; the Sloane, 4001; the Royal, 1950; the Cottonian, 900.

Of the three others we have ample details; their h.o.a.rds have been thoroughly ransacked, and there are scarcely any surprises for the student. We can, without much trouble lay our hands on any fact, beauty, or excellence to be found in them, for there are hardly any hidden gems. But with the Royal library it is different. Each student is his own pioneer, and must make voyages of discovery if he would know something of the riches which it contains.

Its history is scarcely more complete than its catalogue; although the nucleus of the collection must be almost coeval with the monarchy.

Before the reign of James I., however, there were no records except the strangely anomalous ones contained in the Privy Purse Expenses, and in the Wardrobe and Household Accounts of the various English kings who have added to the library. It is curious to light, among the sums disbursed for such items as feather-beds and four-post bedsteads, on the price paid for a rare ma.n.u.script, or for the binding of a choice codex. Queen Elizabeth's "Keeper of the Books" was also "Court Distiller of Odoriferous Herbs," and received a better salary as perfumer than as librarian. But in times when books were more costly, the office of custodian was considered an honourable one, and a Close Roll of the year 1252 makes mention of the Custos librorum Regis.

Impossible though it be to fix the exact date or even reign when the English kings began to collect books, we shall not be wrong if we infer that the Royal library had already a very real existence in the reign of Henry II., when a great literary revival took place. Although the movement originated in the cloister, the court followed in its wake, and William of Malmesbury had his secular counterpart in Alfred of Beverley. A favourite of the king's, Walter de Map, who had been a student in Paris, and Gerald de Barri (Giraldus Cambrensis) divided the honours between courtly and popular themes, while a number of poets and romanticists sprang up and wove fantastic myths and legends out of such material as the Crusades, the Arthurian traditions, and the feats of Charlemagne. King John, with scarcely a quality which men cared to praise, was, strangely enough, fond of books and of scholars. A taste for learning was gradually leavening the barbarous Normanic lump, spreading downwards from monarch to people. Two years before John's death Roger Bacon was born, whose opus Majus embraced every branch of science, and whose life is the whole intellectual life of the thirteenth century. Matthew Paris, the last of the great monastic historians, was the intimate friend of Henry III., who delighted in his scholars.h.i.+p, and loved to visit him in the scriptorium at St. Alban's where he himself contributed to the famous chronicle, which would alone have sufficed to make the reputation of the learned Benedictine. Thus, indirectly, we are led to the Royal library.

In 1250, a French book is mentioned in a State Paper as belonging to the king, but being actually in the keeping of the Knights Templars, who are commanded to hand it over to an officer of the Wardrobe, with the apparent object that the king's painters might copy from it when painting a room called the Antioch Chamber.

In the reign of Edward I. a part of the Royal library was kept in the Treasury of the Exchequer, and a few of the books are mentioned in the Wardrobe Accounts of the year 1302. These included Latin service books, treatises on devotional subjects, and romances. One book is described as "Textus, in a case of leather on which magnates are wont to be sworn."

All through the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries there are occasional allusions to the king's books in the Wardrobe Accounts, and the Exchequer Inventory of Edward II. enumerates "a book bound in red leather, De regimine Regum; a small book on the rule of the Knights Templars, De regula Templariorum; a st.i.tched book, De Vita sancti Patricii; and a st.i.tched book in a tongue unknown to the English which begins thus: Edmygaw dorit doyrmyd dinas," and other books and rolls "very foreign to the English tongue," the scribe, not knowing Welsh even by sight, whereas, although he might not be able to read them, he would probably know the look of Greek or Hebrew ma.n.u.scripts. The list closes with the Chronicle of Roderick de Ximenez, Archbishop of Toledo, "bound in green leather."*

* Stapleton's exchequer Inventory, Edward II.

A doc.u.ment, belonging to the year 1419, and printed by Sir Francis Palgrave, relates to the delivery into the King's Treasury of five volumes, consisting of a Bible, a copy of the Book of Chronicles, a treatise, De conceptione Beatae Mariae, a compendium of theology, and a volume ent.i.tled Libellus de emendatione vitae. But in the following year these ma.n.u.scripts were given to the monastery at Sheen. In 1426 a book described as Egesippus, another as Liber de observantia Papa, were borrowed from the library in the Treasury by Cardinal Beaufort, and there are subsequent notices of the return and re-loan of the same volumes to the same borrower. It is interesting to note that a ma.n.u.script called Hegesippus De Bello Judaico, etc., still in the Royal library, is ascribed by Casley to the eleventh century, and may be identified with the former of these two books.

In the following years entries occur of works on Civil Law, and of some others being lent to the Master of King's College, Cambridge, and of their subsequent presentation to that house, with the a.s.sent of the Lords of the Council.

In the Wardrobe accounts of Edward IV. (Royal MS. 14, C 8), there are entries relating to "the coveryng and garnys.h.i.+ng of the bookes of oure saide Souverain Lorde the Kinge," which mark his possession in 1480 of certain choice MSS., and the same doc.u.ment shows that these were bound by Piers Bauduyn for the king. Among them were a Froissart, the binding, gilding, and dressing of which cost 20S., and a Biblia Historians (now marked 19 D 2 in the Royal library), bound and ornamented for the same sum. On a fly-leaf is an inscription recording its purchase for 100 marks by William de Montacute, Earl of Salisbury, after the battle of Poitiers. It had been taken as loot among the baggage of the French king. On his death in 1397, the Earl of Salisbury bequeathed it to his wife, who, in her will, ordered that it should be sold for forty livres.

When the king went from London to Eltham his books went with him, and some were put into "divers cofyns of fyrre," and others into his carriage. They were bound in "figured cramoisie velvet, with rich laces and ta.s.sels, with b.u.t.tons of silk and gold, and with clasps bearing the king's arms." The only reference to books in the will of Edward IV. is in regard to such as appertained "to oure chapell," which he bequeathed to his queen, such only being excepted "as we shall hereafter dispose to goo to oure saide Collage of Wyndesore."*

* Add. MS., Transcript by Rymer, No. 4615.

Henry VII. stands between the Middle Ages and modern times, but his additions to the Royal library consisted chiefly of Renaissance literature. Notwithstanding his parsimony in most matters, his Privy Purse Expenses contain a remarkable series of entries of payments for books, for copying ma.n.u.scripts, and for binding them. On one occasion the sum of 23 pounds was spent on a single book, and there is an item of 2 pounds paid to a clerk for copying The Amity of Flanders. He bought a great number of romances in French as well as the grand series of volumes printed on vellum by the famous Antoine Verard. Bacon describes Henry VII. as "a prince, sad, serious, and full of thoughts and secret observations, and full of notes and memorials of his own hand . . . rather studious than learned, reading most books that were of any worth, in the French tongue. Yet he understood the Latin."*

* Life and Rein of Henry VII, i., 637.

He had also a taste for finely illuminated books of devotion, and presented a beautiful Missal to his daughter Margaret, Queen of Scots, in which he inscribed his own name in enormous letters several times.

This book is now in the possession of the Duke of Devons.h.i.+re. In the Royal collection is another Missal which belonged to the same king, written in a late Gothic hand.

Henry VII. was careful to have his children well instructed, and his second son, being intended for the Church, received an education fitting him for an ecclesiastical career. In his youth Henry VIII.

displayed considerable literary talent, posed as a patron of scholars, and smiled benignly on such geniuses as Erasmus, More, Linacre, and Grocyn; but in after years he was more keen to destroy other peoples'

libraries than to build up his own. The accounts of his Privy Purse Expenses contain few entries of disburs.e.m.e.nts for books, and to take one short period as a specimen, we find that the whole sum spent on his library between 1530 and 1532, including not merely all moneys paid for binding, but also an indefinite amount "to the taylour and skynner for certeyn stuff, and workmans.h.i.+p for my lady Anne," was only 124 pounds, 16s. 3d. These figures become still more insignificant if we compare them with those representing the money spent during the same period for jewels alone, exclusive of plate, which amounted to the prodigious sum of 10,800 pounds.

But although Henry VIII. did not buy books extensively, he sometimes borrowed them, and several entries chronicle the lending of books to him by monastic and other libraries, when he was pestering Christendom for arguments in favour of his divorce from Katharine of Arragon.

Nevertheless, in spite of adverse circ.u.mstances, the Royal library had been steadily growing in the course of ages, and had by this time a.s.sumed notable proportions. Henry VIII. found himself the possessor of a collection of books at Windsor, comprising 109 volumes in bindings of velvet and leather, with silver and jewelled clasps; of another at Westminster, consisting of Latin primers, some richly ornamented, of a few Greek authors, Latin cla.s.sics, and English chronicles, "bokes written in tholde Saxon tongue." He had another library at Beaulieu (now New Hall) in Ess.e.x, with about 60 volumes of Latin authors, besides works of the Fathers, dictionaries, and histories. At Beddington in Surrey he had many chronicles and romances, and "a greate boke of parchment written and lymned with gold of graver's work--De Confessione Amantis, which may be identified as the MS., now marked 18 C 22, in the Royal library. At Richmond was a small collection made by his father, consisting chiefly of missals and romances. At St. James's Palace were, among others, works described vaguely as "a boke of parchment containing divers patterns; a white boke written on parchment; one boke covered with green velvet contained in a wooden case; a little boke covered with crimson velvet," and so on, a curious method of cataloguing and utterly useless for the purpose of identification after so long an interval. Here and there a distinctive t.i.tle occurs, such as the Foundation Book of Henry VIIth's Chapel.

All these different small collections together represented the Royal library in the early part of the sixteenth century. Henry VIII. had the greater number of the books removed to Greenwich, where there were already some printed volumes and a few ma.n.u.scripts. That part which remained at Westminster was enriched with some of the spoils of the monasteries, placed there perhaps by Leland to save them from destruction.* Among these was a Latin Evangelia of the eleventh century (1 D 3), which belonged to the monks of Rochester, and which had been given to them by a certain Countess G.o.da, according to an inscription in the book itself. From Christ Church, Canterbury, came a fine copy of the gospels (1 A 1 8), presented to that monastery by King Athelstan, and from St. Alban's several choice historical and theological works from the pen of Matthew Paris.

* Edward's Memoirs of Libraries, i., 364 et seq.

It is a question whether the attention bestowed on the Royal library during the reign of Edward VI. was an advantage to it or the reverse.

It is true that the energy of Sir John Cheke, and Roger Ascham, King's librarian, secured for it the ma.n.u.scripts that had belonged to Martin Bucer; but on the other hand, the rabid intolerance of Edward's Council deprived it of many of its valuable contents. On the 25th January 1550, a so-called king's letter, sent from the Council Board, authorised certain commissioners to make a descent upon all public and private libraries, and to "cull out all superst.i.tious books, as missals, legends, and such like, and to deliver the garniture of the books, being either gold or silver, to Sir Anthony Aucher.* The havoc thus wrought was irremediable, and not even the king's own library was spared the terrible perquisitions. But at the same time we cannot but marvel that still so many of the condemned books should have escaped the notice of the commissioners. In the same year the libraries at Oxford were also "purged of a great part of Fathers and Schoolmen," and great heaps of books set on fire in the market-place were watched with delight by the younger members of the university, who named the conflagration "Scotus's funeral."

* Council Book of Edward VI.

The short and troubled reign of Mary afforded no scope for literary activity, and Elizabeth was far too busy outwitting her enemies abroad, and controlling the factious tendencies of her friends at home, to be able to cultivate her taste for books. Nevertheless, although in the course of a hundred years the Royal library had suffered as much as it had gained, it was even then a goodly sight. Paul Hentzner, the German literary tourist, who visited it in 1598, says that it was "well stored with Greek, Latin, and French books, bound in velvet of different colours, although chiefly red, with clasps of gold and silver, the corners of some being otherwise adorned with gold and precious stones."* Perhaps the custodians vouchsafed him but a glance at these outer splendours, for he tells us nothing of the treasures within, of which all this magnificence was only the antechamber.

* P. Hentzner, Itnerarium Germaniae, Angliae, etc., p. 188.

But the golden age of the Royal library was in the reign of James I., and its greatest benefactor a youth who died at the age of eighteen. It were idle to speculate on what might have been the future of Henry, Prince of Wales, had he lived to fulfil the bright promise of his boyhood. To a singularly well-balanced mind, he appears to have joined an amiability of character that endeared him to all save the crotchety doctrinaire who sat upon the throne. He loved hunting and hawking and all healthy open-air pursuits no less than he loved books, and the society of men, who were the history-makers of his day. He would visit Sir Walter Raleigh in his prison in the Tower, and listen to his brilliant projects for the future greatness of England in the development of her colonies, and the annexation of still barbarous lands, the fabulous wealth of which was the life-long dream of the veteran explorer.

But Raleigh was not a mere dreamer, as his History of the World shows--a work which, written during his long years of captivity, became the text-book and standard authority for the next two hundred years.

Whatever his faults, and he had perhaps grave ones, it was his misfortune to be in some ways in advance of the age in which he lived, in consequence of which his finer qualities were misunderstood by most of his contemporaries. Prince Henry was not, however, among their number; he lent a fascinated ear to Raleigh's grand, patriotic schemes, and had they both lived, the one to reign, the other to counsel and guide, England might not only have been spared the most disgraceful blot on her escutcheon, but have antic.i.p.ated by more than two hundred years her subsequent achievements. It was without doubt Sir Walter Raleigh who inspired the young prince to take the Royal library under his protection, and his pupil threw himself heart and soul into the work, so that rightly or wrongly he has been considered its real founder.