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CHAPTER II

=THE FOUNDER OF THE COTTONIAN LIBRARY.=

‘Est in hac urbe nobilis Eques, homo pereruditus rerum vetustarum et omnis historiæ, sive priscæ, sive recentis, studiossisimus, qui ex ipsis monumentis publicis et epistolis duarum reginarum Angliæ et Scotiæ veram eorum quæ gesta sunt, historiam didicit, et jam regis jussu eandem componit, digeritque in ordinem.’

CASAUBON to DE THOU (London, 5 Kal. Mart., 1611). _Epistolæ_, 373.

_The Personal and Public Life of Sir Robert_ COTTON.—_His Political Writings and Political Persecutions.—Sources and Growth of the Cottonian Library.—The Successors of Sir Robert_ COTTON.—_History of the Cottonian Library, until its union with the Library of Harley, and with the Museum and Miscellaneous Collections of_ SLOANE.—_Review of some recent Aspersions on the Character of the Founder._

[Sidenote: BOOK I, Chap. II. LIFE OF SIR ROBERT COTTON.]

Sir Robert COTTON was the eldest son of Thomas COTTON of Conington and of Elizabeth SHIRLEY, daughter of Francis SHIRLEY of Staunton-Harold in Leicestershire. He was born on the 22nd of January, 1570, at Denton, in the county of Huntingdon. Denton was a sort of jointure-house attached to that ancient family seat of Conington, which had come into the possession of the Cottons, about the middle of the preceding century, by the marriage of William COTTON with Mary WESENHAM, daughter and heir of Robert WESENHAM, who had acquired Conington by his marriage with Agnes BRUCE.[1]

[Sidenote: PARENTAGE AND ANCESTRY OF SIR ROBERT COTTON.]

The Cottons of Conington were an offshoot of the old Cheshire stock. They held a good local position in right of their manorial possessions both in Huntingdonshire and in Cambridgeshire, but they had not, as yet, won distinction by any very conspicuous public service. Genealogically, their descent, through Mary WESENHAM, from Robert BRUCE, was their chief boast. Sir Robert was to become, as he grew to manhood, especially proud of it. He rarely missed an opportunity of commemorating the fact, and sometimes seized occasions for recording it, heraldically, after a fashion which has put stumbling-blocks in the way of later antiquaries. But the weakness has about it nothing of meanness. It is not an unpardonable failing. And with the specially antiquarian virtues it is not less closely allied than with love of country. In days of court favour, JAMES THE FIRST was wont to please Sir Robert COTTON by calling him cousin. Sir Robert’s descendants became, in their turn, proud of his personal celebrity, but they too were, at all times, as careful to celebrate, upon the family monuments, their Bruce descent, as to claim a share in the literary glories of the ‘Cottonian Library.’

This cousinship with King James—and also a matter which to Sir Robert was much more important, the descent to the Cottons of the rich Lordship of Conington with its appendant manors and members—will be seen, at a glance, by the following—

[From the COTTON ROLL XIV, 6 [by SEGAR, CAMDEN, and ST. GEORGE]; compared with MS. Hark 807, fol. 95, and with MS. LANSD., 863, containing the heraldic Collections of R. ST. GEORGE, Norroy, Vol. III, fol. 82 verso.]

[For the continuation of the COTTON PEDIGREE, showing (1) the descent from Sir Robert of the subsequent possessors of the COTTONIAN LIBRARY, up to the date of the gift to the Nation made by Sir John COTTON, and (2) the relationship of the Cottonian Trustees of the British Museum, see the concluding pages of the present Chapter.]

Robert COTTON was educated at Trinity College in Cambridge, where he took the degree of B.A. towards the close of 1585.[4] Of his collegiate career very little is discoverable, save that it was an eminently studious one. [Sidenote: COTTON’S EARLY FRIENDSHIPS.] Long before he left Trinity, he had given unmistakeable proofs of his love for archæology. Some among the many conspicuous and lifelong friendships which he formed with men likeminded took their beginnings at Cambridge, but most of them were formed during his periodical and frequent sojourns in London. John JOSCELINE, William DETHICK, Lawrence NOWELL, William LAMBARDE, and William CAMDEN were amongst his earliest and closest friends. Most of them were much his seniors. Whilst still in the heyday of youth he married Elizabeth BROCAS, daughter and eventually coheir of William BROCAS of Thedingworth in Leicestershire. Soon after his marriage he took a leading part in the establishment of the first Society of Antiquaries. Some of COTTON’S fellow-workers in the Society are known to all of us by their surviving writings. Others of them are now almost forgotten, though not less deserving, perhaps, of honourable memory; for amongst these latter was—

‘that good Earl, once President Of England’s Council and her Treasury; Who liv’d in both unstain’d with gold or fee,’

at a time when such praise could seldom be given truthfully. It was as a contributor towards the common labours of that Society that COTTON made his earliest appearance as an author. The subjects chosen for his discourses at the periodical meetings of the Elizabethan antiquarians indicate the prevalent bias of his mind. Nearly all of them may be said to belong to our political archæology.

[Sidenote: GROWTH OF THE COTTONIAN LIBRARY AND GALLERY.]

Before the close of the sixteenth century, his collections of Manuscripts and of Antiquities had already become so large and important as to win for him a wide reputation in foreign countries, as well as at home. His correspondence indicates, even at that early period, a generous recognition of the brotherhood of literature, the world over, and proves the ready courtesy with which he had learned to bear somewhat more than his fair share of the obligations thence arising. In later days he was wont to say to his intimates: ‘I, myself, have the smallest share in myself.’ From youth, onwards, there is abundant evidence that the saying expressed, unboastingly, the simple facts of his daily life.

[Sidenote: FRIENDSHIP WITH CAMDEN.]

CAMDEN was amongst the earliest of those intimates, and to the dying day of the author of the _Britannia_ the close friendship which united him with COTTON was both unbroken and undiminished. The former was still in the full vigour of life when COTTON had given proof of his worthiness to be a fellow-labourer in the field of English antiquities. In 1599 they went, in company, over the northern counties; explored together many an old abbey and many a famous battle-field. When that tour was made, the evidences of the ruthless barbarism with which the mandates of HENRY THE EIGHTH had been carried out by his agents lay still thick upon the ground, and may well have had their influence in modifying some of the religious views and feelings of such tourists. Not a few chapters of the _Britannia_ embody the researches of COTTON as well as those of CAMDEN; and the elder author was ever ready to acknowledge his deep sense of obligation to his younger colleague. For both of them, at this time, and in subsequent years, the storied past was more full of interest than the politics, howsoever momentous or exciting, of the day. But, occasionally, they corresponded on questions of policy as well as of history. There is evidence that on one stirring subject, about which men’s views were much wont to run to extremes, they agreed in advocating moderate courses. In the closing years of the Queen, COTTON, as well as CAMDEN, recognised the necessity that the Government should hold a firm hand over the emissaries of the Church and Court of Rome, whilst refusing to admit that a due repression of hostile intrigues was inconsistent with the honourable treatment of conscientious and peaceful Romanists.

It was, in all probability, almost immediately after COTTON’S return from the Archæological tour to the North which he had made with his early friend, that he received a message from the Queen. ELIZABETH had been told of his growing fame for possessing an acquaintance with the mustiest of records, and an ability ‘to vouch precedents’ such as few students, even of much riper years, had attained to. He was now to be acquainted with a dispute about national precedency which had arisen at Calais between Sir Henry NEVILLE and the Ambassador of Spain. [Sidenote: THE TRACTATE ON ENGLISH PRECEDENCY OVER SPAIN.] It was Her Majesty’s wish that he should search the records which bore upon the question, and send her such a report as might strengthen NEVILLE’S hands in his contest for the honour of England.

Such a task could not fail to be a welcome one; and COTTON found no lack of pertinent evidence. The bent and habit of his mind were always methodical. He begins his abstract of the records by tabulating his argument. Precedency, he says, must have respect either to the nation or to the ruler of the nation. A kingdom must rank either (1) according to its antiquity, or (2) according to ‘the eminency of the throne royal,’ by which phrase he means the complete unity of the dominion under one supreme ruler. On the first title to precedency he observes that it may be based either upon the date of national independence, or upon that of the national recognition of Christianity. He claims for England that it was a monarchy at least four hundred and sixty years before Castile became one; that Christianity had then been established in it, without break or interruption, for a thousand years; [Sidenote: _Cottoni Posthuma_, pp. 76, 77.] whereas in Spain Christianity was ‘defaced with Moorish Mahumetisme,’ until the expulsion of the Moors by FERDINAND, little more than a century before the time at which he was writing.

His assertion of the greater ‘eminency of the throne royal’ in England than in Spain is mainly founded on the union in the English sovereignty alone of supreme ecclesiastical with supreme civil power; and on the lineal descent of the then sovereign ‘from Christian princes for 800 years,’ whereas the descent of the Kings of Spain ‘is chiefly from the Earls of Castilia, about 500 years since,’ and the then King of Spain was ‘yet in the infancy of his kingdom.’

Two minor and ancillary arguments in this tract are also notable: The Spanish throne, says COTTON, hath not, as hath the English and French, ‘that virtue to endow the king therein invested with the power to heal the king’s evil; for into France do yearly come multitudes of Spaniards to be healed thereof.’ And he further alleges that ‘absolute power of the King of England, which in other kingdoms is much restrained.’ The time was to come when the close friend and fellow-combatant of ELIOT and the other framers of the great ‘Petition of Right’ would rank himself with the foremost in ‘much restraining’ the kingly power in England, and would discover ample warrant in ancient precedents for every step of the process. But, as yet, that time was afar off.

[Sidenote: MS. Cott. Vesp. C. xiii, ff. 158; 160, seqq. (B. M.)]

Immediately on the accession of King JAMES, Sir Robert COTTON greeted the new monarch with two other and far more remarkable tractates on a subject bearing closely on our relations with Spain. Their political interest, as contributions to the history of public opinion, is great. Their biographical interest is still greater. But I postpone the consideration of them until we reach a momentous crisis in Sir Robert’s life on which they have a vital bearing. He also wrote,—almost simultaneously,—a much more courtierlike ‘_Discourse of his Majesty’s descent from the Saxon Kings_,’ which was graciously welcomed. [Sidenote: _Domestic Correspondence_, James I, vol. i, f. 3 (R. H.).] In the following September he received the honour of knighthood. [Sidenote: RETURNED TO PARLIAMENT.] In JAMES’ first Parliament he sat for the County of Huntingdon, in fellowship with Sir Oliver CROMWELL, uncle of the future Protector. There is no evidence that at this period he took any active part in debate. Nor did he, at any time, win distinction as a debater. But in the labours of Committees he was soon both zealous and prominent. Two classes of questions, in particular, appear to have engaged his attention:—questions of Church discipline, and questions of administrative reform. [Sidenote: _Dom. Cor._ as above; vol. xix, pp. 37 seqq.; vol. xxvii, pp. 44 seqq. (R. H.); MS. Cott. Jul. C., iii, p. 10. (B. M.)] He also assisted Bacon in the difficult attempt to frame acceptable measures for a union with Scotland.

The fame of his library and of his museum of antiquities continued to spread farther and wider. He had many agents on the Continent who sought diligently to augment his collections. His correspondence with men who were busied in like pursuits both at home and abroad increased. Much of it has survived. On that interesting point at which a glance has been cast already, its witness is uniform. He was always as ready to impart as he was eager to collect. Few, if any, important works of historical research were carried on in his day to which he did not, in some way or other, give generous furtherance. At a time when he was most busy in forming his own library, he helped BODLEY to lay the foundation of the noble library at Oxford.

[Sidenote: FURTHER GROWTH AND SOURCES OF THE COTTONIAN LIBRARY.]

Readers who can call to mind even mere fragments of that superabundant evidence which tells of the neglect throughout much of the Tudor period of the public archives of the realm, can feel little surprise that Sir Robert COTTON should have been able to collect a multitude of documents which had once been the property of the nation, or of the sovereign. Those who are most familiar with that evidence ought to be the first to remember that, under the known circumstances of the time, the presumption of honest acquisition is stronger than that of dishonest, whenever conclusive proof of either is absent. English State Papers had passed into the possession not only of English antiquarians, but of English booksellers—and not a few of them into that of foreigners—before COTTON was born. Other considerations bearing on this matter, and tending as it seems in a like direction, belong to a later period of Sir Robert’s life. There is, however, a very weighty one which stands at the threshold of his career as a collector.

Almost the earliest incident which is recorded of COTTON’S youthful days, is his concurrence in a petition in which Queen ELIZABETH was entreated to establish a Public and National Library, and to honour it with her own name. [Sidenote: ATTEMPT OF COTTON AND CAMDEN TO ESTABLISH A NATIONAL LIBRARY.] Its especial and prime object was to be the collection and preservation, as public property, of the monuments of our English history. The proposal was not altogether new. It was a much improved revival of a project which Dr. John DEE had once submitted, in an immature form, to Queen MARY. It was the reiteration of an earnest request which had been made to Queen ELIZABETH by Archbishop PARKER, at a time when COTTON was still in his cradle. The joint petition of COTTON and CAMDEN met with as little success as had attended the entreaties of those who had taken the same path before them. [Sidenote: _Petition, &c._ (undated) in Cotton MS. Faustina, E. V, ff. 67, 68.] The petitioners were willing to bind themselves, and others like-minded, to incur ‘costs, and charges,’ for the effectual attainment of their patriotic object, on the condition of royal patronage and royal fellow-working with them in its pursuit. When COTTON, upon bare presumptions, is charged to be an embezzler of records, this Petition comes to have a very obvious relevancy to the matter in question. The relevancy is enhanced by the fact that two, at least, of those who had (at various times) concurred in promoting its object, gave to the Library of their fellow-labourer in the field of antiquity, manuscripts and records which, had the issue of their project been otherwise, they would have given to the ‘Public Library of Queen ELIZABETH,’ in express trust for their fellow-countrymen at large.

Indirectly, this same petition has also its bearing on a curious passage relating to Sir Robert COTTON which occurs among the Minute-books of the Corporation of London, and which has recently been printed by Mr. RILEY, in his preface to _Liber Custumarum_.

On the 10th of November, 1607, the Court of Aldermen of London recorded the following minute: [Sidenote: COTTON AND THE CITY RECORDS OF LONDON.] ‘It is this day ordered, that Mr. Chamberlain, Mr. Town Clerk, Mr. EDMONDS, and Mr. Robert SMITH, or any three of them, shall repair to Sir Robert COTTON, from this Court, and require him to deliver to the City’s use three of the City’s books _which have been long time missing_—the first book called _Liber Custumarum_; the second, called _Liber Legum Antiquorum_; and the thirde, called _Fletewode_, which are affirmed to be in his custody.’ Of the results of the interview of Master Chamberlain and his fellow-ambassadors with COTTON no precise account has been preserved. It is plain, however, from the sequel, that they found the matter to be one for which such extremely curt ‘requisition’ was scarcely the appropriate mode of setting to work. The Corporation appealed in vain to the Lord Privy Seal NORTHAMPTON; and they had afterwards to solicit the mediation with COTTON of two of their own members—Sir John JOLLES and another—who were personally known to him. Their interposition was alike ineffectual. Of the interview we have no report; but Sir Robert, it is clear, asserted his right to retain the City books (or rather portions of books) which were then in his hands, and he did retain them. They now form part of the well-known and very valuable Cottonian MS., ‘Claudius D. XI.’

That these London records had once belonged to the citizens is now unquestioned. That Cotton—both in 1607 and again in the following year—asserted a title, of some sort, to those of them which were then in his hands, seems also to be established. Is the fair inference this: ‘Their then holder, in 1607, had obtained them wrongfully, and he persisted, despite all remonstrance, in his wrongful possession’? Is it not rather to be inferred that, whosoever may have been the original wrongdoer, Sir Robert COTTON had acquired them by a lawful purchase? [Sidenote: THE DISPUTE ABOUT CITY RECORDS.] If that should have been the fact, he may possibly have had a valid reason for declining to give what he had, ineffectually and rudely, been commanded to restore.

On the other hand, it is impossible to defend Sir Robert’s occasional mode of dealing with MSS.,—some of which, it is plain, were but lent to him,—when, by misplacement of leaves, or by insertions, and sometimes by both together, he confused their true sequence and aspect. Of this unjustifiable manipulation I shall have to speak hereafter.

The years which followed close upon this little civic interlude were amongst the busiest years of COTTON’S public life. He testified the sincerity of his desire to serve his country faithfully, by the choice of the subjects to the study of which he voluntarily bent his powers.

[Sidenote: COTTON’S MEMORIAL ON ABUSES IN THE NAVY.]

Abuses in the management of the navy and of naval establishments have been at most periods of our history fruitful topics for reformers, competent or other. In the early years of JAMES there was a special tendency to the increase of such abuses in the growing unfitness for exertion of the Lord High Admiral. NOTTINGHAM had yet many years to live,—near as he had been to the threescore and ten when the new reign began. But even his large appetencies were now almost sated with wealth, employments, and honours; and ever since his return from his splendid embassy to Spain, he seemed bent on compensating himself for his hard labour under ELIZABETH by his indolent luxury under JAMES. The repose of their chief had so favoured the illegitimate activities of his subordinates, that when COTTON addressed himself to the task of investigating the state of the naval administration he soon found that it would be much easier to prove the existence and the gravity of the abuses than to point to an effectual remedy.

The abuses were manifold. Some of them were, at that moment, scarcely assailable. To COTTON, in particular, the approach to the subject was beset with many difficulties. He was, however, much in earnest. [Sidenote: THE INQUIRY INSTITUTED BY COTTON INTO ABUSES IN THE ROYAL NAVY.] When he found that some of the obstacles must, for the present, be rather turned by evasion than be encountered—with any fair chance of success—by an open attack in front, he betook himself to the weaker side of the enemy. He obtained careful information as to naval account-keeping; discovered serious frauds; and opened the assault by a conflict with officials not too powerful for immediate encounter,—though far indeed from being unprotected.

[Sidenote: Cotton, _Memorial on Abuses of the Navy;—Domestic Corresp._ James I, vol. xli, p. 21. (R. H).]

Of Sir Robert’s _Memorial_ to the King, I can give but one brief extract, by way of sample: ‘Upon a dangerous advantage,’ he writes, ‘which the Treasurer of the Navy taketh by the strict letter of his Patent, to be discharged of all his accounts by the only vouchee and allowance of _two_ chief officers, it falls out, strangely, at this time—by the weakness of the Controller and cunning of the Surveyor—that these two offices are, in effect, but _one_, which is the Surveyor himself, who—joining with the Treasurer as a Purveyor of all provisions—becomes a paymaster to himself ... at such rates as _he_ thinks good.’ It is a suggestive statement.

COTTON’S most intimate political friendships were at this time with the HOWARDS. Henry HOWARD (now Earl of Northampton),—whatever the intrinsic baseness and perfidy of his nature, was a man of large capacity. He was not unfriendly to reform,—when abuses put no pelf in his own pocket. To naval reforms, his nearness of blood to NOTTINGHAM, the Lord High Admiral, tended rather to predispose him; for when near relatives dislike one another, the intensity of their dislike is sometimes wonderful to all bystanders. Interest made these two sometimes allies, but it never made them friends. NORTHAMPTON gave his whole influence in favour of Sir Robert’s plan. He began the inquiries into this wide subject by persuading the King to appoint a Commission. On the 30th of April, 1608, Letters Patent were issued, in the preamble of which the pith of the Memorial is thus recited: ‘We are informed that very great and considerable abuses, deceits, frauds, corruptions, negligences, misdemeanours and offences have been and daily are perpetrated ... _against the continual admonitions and directions of you, our Lord High Admiral_, by other the officers of and concerning our Navy Royal, and by the Clerks of the Prick and Check, and divers other inferior officers, ministers, mariners, soldiers, and others working or labouring in or about our said Navy;’ [Sidenote: COMMISSION FOR INQUIRY ON THE ABUSES IN THE NAVY.] and thereupon full powers are given to the Commissioners so appointed to make full inquiry into the allegations; and to certify their proceedings and opinions. COTTON was made a member of the Commission, and at the head of it were placed the Earls of NORTHAMPTON and of NOTTINGHAM. It was directed that the inquiry should be carried at least as far back as the year 1598. The Admiral’s share was little more than nominal. The proceedings were opened on the 7th of May, 1608, when, as

COTTON himself reports, an ‘elegant speech was made by Lord Northampton, of His Majesty’s provident and princely purposes for reformation of the abuses.’ Northampton, he adds, ‘took especial pains and care for a full and faithful discharge of that trust.’ At his instance Sir Robert was made Chairman of a sort of sub-committee, to which the preliminary inquiries and general array of the business were entrusted; [Sidenote: _Proceedings in the Commission for the Navy Royal_; MS. COTT. Julius F. iii, fol. 1. (B. M.)] ‘Sir Robert COTTON, during all the time of this service, entertaining his assistants at his house at the Blackfriars as often as occasion served.’

The inquiry lasted from May, 1608, to June, 1609. COTTON was then requested by his fellow-commissioners to make an abstract of the depositions to be reported to the King. It abundantly justified the Memorial of 1608. JAMES, when he had read it, ordered a final meeting of the Commissioners to be held in his presence, at which all the inculpated officers were to attend that they might adduce whatever answers or pleas of defence might be in their power. ‘In the end,’ says Sir Robert, ‘they were advised rather to cast themselves at the feet of his grace and goodness for pardon, than to rely upon their weak replies; which they readily did.’ The most important outcome of the inquiry was the preparation of a ‘_Book of Ordinances for the Navy Royal_,’ in the framing of which Sir Robert COTTON had the largest share. It led to many improvements. But, in subsequent years, measures of a still more stringent character were found needful.

[Sidenote: THE INQUIRY INTO CROWN REVENUES.]

In the next year after the presentation of this Report on the Navy, Sir Robert addressed to the King another Report on the Revenues of the Crown. The question is treated historically rather than politically, but the long induction of fiscal records is frequently enlivened by keen glances both at underlying principles and at practical results. Once or twice, at least, these side glances are such as, when we now regard them, in the light of the subsequent history of JAMES’S own reign and of that of his next successor, seem to have in them more of irony than of earnest. The style of the treatise is clear, terse, and pointed.

On no branch of the subject does the author go into more minute detail than on that delicate one of the historical precedents for ‘abating and reforming excesses of the Royal Household, Retinue, and Favourites.’ He points the moral by express reference to existing circumstances. Thus, for example, in treating of the arrangements of the royal household, he says, ‘There is never a back-door at Court that costs not the king £2000 yearly;’ and again, when treating of gifts to royal favourites: ‘It is one of the greatest accusations against the Duke of Somerset for suffering the King [EDWARD VI] to give away the possessions and profits of the Crown in manner of a spoil.’

Not less plainspoken are COTTON’S words about a question that was destined, in a short time, to excite the whole kingdom. Tonnage and poundage, he says, were granted simply for defence of the State, ‘so they may be employed in the wars; and particular Treasurers account in Parliament’ for that employment. [Sidenote: _Proceedings in the Commission for the Navy Royal, &c._; as above.] ‘They are so granted,’ he adds, ‘in express words; and that they proceed of goodwill, not of duty. Precedents of this nature are plentiful in all the Rolls.’ A final example of this sort may be found in the pithy warning grounded upon RICHARD THE SECOND’S grant to a minion of the power of compounding with delinquents. It was fatal, he says, both to the king and to his instrument. ‘It grew the death of the one and the deposition of the other.’

COTTON’S Report on the Crown Revenues has also an incidental interest. Out of it grew the creation of the new dignity of baronets. Were His Majesty, says the writer, ‘now to make a degree of honour hereditary as Baronets, next under Barons, and grant them in tail, taking of every one £1000, in fine it would raise with ease £100,000; [Sidenote: COTTON’S PROPOSITION FOR THE CREATION OF BARONETS, 1609.] and, _by a judicious election_, be a means to content those worthy persons in the Commonwealth that by the confused admission of [so] many Knights of the Bath held themselves all this time disgraced.’ When this passage was written that which had been, under ELIZABETH, so real and eminent an honour as to be eagerly coveted by patriotic men, had been lavished by JAMES with a profusion which entailed their contempt and disgust. I have before me the fine old MS. from a passage in which COTTON borrowed the title of the new dignity. [Sidenote: 9 R. II. Durh. 17 July, 1385. COTTON MS., Nero D., vi, § 16. (B. M.)] The word occurs thus:—‘_Ceux sont les estatutz, ordenances ... de n̄re très excellent souv seigneur le Roy Richard, et Johan, Duc de Lancastre, ... et des autres Contes, Barons, et_ Baronnetz, _et sages Chivalers_.’

Sir Robert was himself amongst the earliest receivers (June, 1611) of the new order. Its creation led to many jealousies and discords. It gave both to the King and to his councillors not a little trouble in settling the precise privileges and precedencies of its holders. In those controversies the author of the suggestion took no very active part. King JAMES was much more anxious for the speedy receipt of the hundred thousand pounds, than about the ‘judicious election’ of those by whom the money was to be provided. COTTON’S satisfaction with the ultimate working out of his plan must have had its large alloy.[5]

This is the more apparent, inasmuch as, at the first acceptance of his project, Sir Robert had obtained the King’s distinct promise that no future creation of a baron should be made, until the new peer had first received the degree of baronet; unless he belonged to a family already ennobled. Hearing of a probability that the royal promise in this respect was likely to be broken, he wrote to Somerset:—‘If His Highness _will_ do it, I rather humbly beg a relinquishing in the design of the baronets, as desponding of good success.’ [Sidenote: Cotton to Somerset (undated) MS. Harl., 7002, f. 380. (B. M.)] But to James all projects for the opening of gold mines—whether at home or abroad—were much too attractive to be staved off by any puritanic scruples about pledge or promise. For him, from youth to dotage, the one thing needful was gold.

The question of the baronetcies is one of the earliest which brings us in presence of the eventful political connection which subsisted between COTTON and the Earl of SOMERSET. [Sidenote: THE POLITICAL INTERCOURSE OF SIR R. COTTON WITH LORD SOMERSET. 1613–1615.] Of its first beginnings no precise testimony seems to have survived. But there is a strong presumption that when SOMERSET was led, by his fatal love for Lady ESSEX, to change his early position of antagonism to the HOWARDS for one of alliance and friendship, he came frequently into contact with Sir Robert, who had long been familiarly acquainted with the Earl of SUFFOLK—and also with his too well-known Countess—as well as with the Earl of NORTHAMPTON.

The one ineffaceable stigma on SOMERSET’S memory which was brought upon him by his disgraceful marriage has barred the way to an impartial estimate of his standing as a politician. A man who was branded by his peers (though upon garbled depositions) as a murderer can scarcely, by possibility, have his pretensions to statesmanship fairly weighed in a just balance. Such testimony, it is true, as that on which SOMERSET was found guilty of the poisoning of OVERBURY would not now suffice to convict a vagrant of petty larceny. It would not indeed at this day be treated as evidence at all; it would be looked upon as a mere decoction of surmises. But the foul scandal of the marriage itself has so tainted SOMERSET’S very name that historians (almost with one consent) have condoned the baseness of his prosecutors.

With some of this man’s contemporaries it was quite otherwise. Some English statesmen whose names we have all learnt to venerate, looked upon the murder of OVERBURY as a revengeful deed instigated by Lady SOMERSET, wholly without her husband’s complicity; and they looked at SOMERSET’S conviction of complicity in the crime as simply the issue of a skilfully-managed court intrigue, for a court object. They knew that SOMERSET’S enemies had been wont to say amongst themselves, ‘A nail is best driven out by driving in another nail,’ and had, very effectually, put the proverb into action. They knew, too, that to the rising favourite the King had committed—most characteristically—the pleasing task of communicating, on his behalf, with the Crown lawyers, as their own task of compiling the depositions against the falling favourite went on from stage to stage.

Sir Robert COTTON believed not only that SOMERSET was guiltless of the murder of OVERBURY, and that the Earl’s political extinction was resolved upon, as the readiest means of making room for a new favourite, but he also believed that SOMERSET’S loss of power involved the loss by England—for a long time to come—of some useful domestic reforms, as well as its subjection to several new abuses. This belief was a favourite subject of conversation with him to his dying day. He was in the habit of imparting it to the famous men who, in the early years of the next reign, joined with him in fighting the battles of parliamentary freedom against royal prerogative. There may well have been an element of truth in COTTON’S view of the matter, though, in these days, it seems but a barren pursuit to have discussed the preferability to England of the rule of a Robert CARR rather than that of a George VILLIERS.

[Sidenote: COTTON AND THE PROJECTED SPANISH MATCH.]

What is now chiefly important in the close political connection which was formed between COTTON and SOMERSET is the fact that it eventually thrust Sir Robert’s fortune and entire future into great peril, even if it did not actually hazard his life itself, as well as his fair fame with posterity. The life that was preserved to him was also to be redeemed by future and brilliant public service. [Sidenote: 1615.] His fortune sustained no great damage, and much of it was afterwards spent upon public objects. His reputation as a statesman, however, suffered, and must suffer, some degree of loss. SOMERSET led him to become an agent in urging on the treaty for the marriage of Prince CHARLES with the Infanta of Spain. As it seems, his agency was—for a very brief period—even active and zealous. Neither SOMERSET nor COTTON, however, set that intercourse with GONDOMAR afoot which presently brought Sir Robert within the toils. It was pleasantly originated by the wily Spaniard himself, in the character of _a lover of antiquities_, deeply anxious to study Sir Robert’s Museum, in its owner’s company.

It is unfortunate for a truthful estimate of the _degree_ of discredit attachable to Cotton for this agency in promoting a scheme pregnant with dishonour to England, that little evidence of the share he took in it is now to be derived from any English source. His own extant correspondence yields very little, though it suffices to establish the fact of the agency, apart from that testimony of GONDOMAR, which will be cited presently.

Under COTTON’S own hand we have the fact that in a conversation with himself the Ambassador of Spain on one occasion held out (by way, it seems, more immediately, of inducement to the English Government to shape certain pending negotiations on other matters into greater conformity with _Spanish_ counsels) [Sidenote: Cotton to Somerset; (undated) Harleian MS. 7002, fol. 378. (B. M.)] the threat that, if such a course were not taken, ‘turbulent spirits—of which Spain wanteth not—might add some hurt to the ill affairs of Ireland, or hindrance to the near affecting of the great work now in hand;’ a threat which COTTON transmits to SOMERSET without rebuke or comment.

Early in 1615, COTTON had an interview with GONDOMAR in relation to the progress of the marriage negotiation in Spain. Of what passed at this interview we have no _detailed_ account other than that which was sent to the King of Spain by his Ambassador. The way in which COTTON’S name is introduced, and the singular misstatement that he had the custody of ‘all the King’s archives,’ seem to imply that GONDOMAR had still but little knowledge of the messenger now employed by JAMES and by SOMERSET to confer with him. Throughout, the reader will have to bear in mind that the narrative is GONDOMAR’S, and that all the material points of it rest upon his sole authority.

[Sidenote: 1615. April 18.]

‘The King and the Earl of SOMERSET,’ writes the Ambassador, ‘have sent in great secrecy by Sir Robert COTTON—who is a gentleman greatly esteemed here, and with whom the King has deposited all his archives—to tell me what Sir John DIGBY has written about the marriage of the Infanta with this Prince. COTTON informed me that he was greatly pleased that the negotiation had been so well received in Spain, because he desired its conclusion and success. He enlarged upon the conveniencies of the marriage, but said that the King considered DIGBY not to be a good negotiator, because he was a great friend of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and of the Earl of PEMBROKE, who were of the Puritan faction, and was in correspondence with them.’... ‘In order to make a beginning,’ continued COTTON, as GONDOMAR reports his conversation, ‘the King must beg your Majesty to answer three questions: (1.) “Does your Majesty believe that with a safe conscience you can negotiate this marriage?” (2.) “Is your Majesty sincerely desirous to conclude it, upon conditions suitable to both parties?” (3.) “Will your Majesty abstain from asking anything, in matters of Religion, which would compel him to do that which he cannot do without risking his life and his kingdom; contenting yourself with trusting that he will be able to settle matters quietly?” [Sidenote: Gardiner Transcripts of Simancas MSS.] When an answer is given to these questions he will consider the matter as settled, and will immediately give a commission to the Earl of Somerset to arrange the points with me. [Sidenote: See also S. R. Gardiner, in _Letters of Gondomar, giving an Account of the affair of the Earl of Somerset_; (_Archæologia_, vol. xli.)] This Sir Robert COTTON is held here, by many, to be a Puritan, but he told me that he was a Catholic, and gave me many reasons why no man of sense could be anything else.’ He afterwards adds: ‘Sir Robert COTTON, who has treated with me in this business, tells me that after the marriage is agreed upon, [and] before the Infanta arrives in England, matters of Religion will be in a much improved condition.’ The writer of this remarkable despatch, it may be well to mention, had asserted with equal roundness, but a few months before, that JAMES himself had said, at the dinner-table: ‘I have no doubt that the Roman Catholic Church is the true Church.’

[Sidenote: Simancas MSS. 2590, 10 (Gardiner Transcripts).]

Nor is it unimportant, as bearing on the _degree_ of credibility to be assigned to GONDOMAR’S despatches, when they chance to be uncorroborated,—to remark that a despatch addressed by him to the Duke of LERMA, in November, contains an express contradiction of an assertion addressed to PHILIP, in the preceding April. To the King, as we have just seen, he narrates COTTON’S communication of despatches written by DIGBY. To the Minister he writes, six months later, that ‘a traitor had given information’ against COTTON, for communicating Papers of State to the Spanish Ambassador, and that the charge is ‘false.’ [Sidenote: Simancas MS. 2534, 61 (Gardiner Transcripts).] Discrepancies like this (howsoever easily explained, or explainable) suffice to show that GONDOMAR’S testimony, when unsupported, needs to be read with caution; and of such discrepancies there are many. Consummate as he was in diplomatic ability of several kinds, this able statesman was nevertheless loose (and sometimes reckless) in assertion. He was very credulous when he listened to welcome news. It is impossible to study his correspondence without perceiving that to him, as to so many other men, the wish was often father of the thought.

On the 22nd of June, Sir Robert paid another visit to GONDOMAR. He told me, says the Ambassador, that the King’s hesitations had been overcome; that JAMES was now willing to negotiate on the basis of the Spanish articles, with some slight modifications; that Somerset had taken his stand upon the match with Spain, had won the co-operation of the Duke of Lennox, and was now willing to stake his fortunes on the issue. Sir Robert COTTON, adds GONDOMAR, ‘assured me of his own satisfaction at the turn which things had taken, as he had no more ardent wish than to live and die an avowed Catholic, like his fathers and ancestors.[6] Whereupon I embraced him, and said that God would guide.’

Thus far, I have, advisedly, followed a Spanish account of English conversations. Although believing that there exists, already ample, evidence (both in our own archives and elsewhere) for bringing home to the Count of GONDOMAR wilful misstatements of [Sidenote: SIR ROBERT COTTON’S ACCOUNT OF THE FIRST INTERVIEW WITH COUNT GONDOMAR.] fact—in the despatches which he was wont to write from London—as well as very pardonable misapprehensions of the talk which he reports, I have preferred to put before the reader the Ambassador’s own story in its Spanish integrity.

The mere fact, indeed, that an English historian[7], deservedly esteemed for his acute and painstaking research, as well as for his eminent abilities, has honoured GONDOMAR’S story by endorsing it, is warrant enough for citing these despatches as they stand. But they have now to be compared with another account of the same transaction given by authority of Sir Robert COTTON himself. It was given upon a memorable occasion. The place was the Painted Chamber in the Palace of Westminster. The hearers were the assembled Lords and Commons of the Realm.[8]

The Spaniard, it seems, was far, indeed, from holding—as he says that he held—his first conference with COTTON either in his own ambassadorial lodging, or upon credentials given in the name and by the command of King JAMES. That COTTON sought him he suggests, by implication. That the visit, in which the ground was broken, was made at the King’s instance, he states circumstantially. Both the suggestion and the assertion are false.

As the reader has seen, Sir Robert’s openness in exhibiting his library and his antiquities was matter of public notoriety. [Sidenote: 1614. February.] Profiting by that well-known facility of access, the Spanish Ambassador presented himself at Cotton House in the guise of a virtuoso. ‘Do me the favour—with your wonted benevolence to strangers—to let me see your Museum.’ With some such words as these, GONDOMAR volunteered his first visit; led the conversation, by and bye, to politics; found that COTTON was not amongst the fanatical and undiscriminating enemies of Spain at all price—outspoken, as he had been, from the first, in his assertion both of the wisdom and of the duty of England to protect the Netherlanders; showed him certain letters or papers (not now to be identified, it appears), and in that way produced an impression on COTTON’S mind which led him to confer with SOMERSET, and eventually with the King. So much is certain. Unfortunately, the speeches at the famous ‘Conference’ on the Spanish Treaty, in 1624, are reported in the most fragmentary way imaginable. The reporter gives mere hints, where the reader anxiously looks for details. Their present value lies in the conclusive reasons which notwithstanding the lacunæ—they supply for weighing, with many grains of caution, the accusations of an enemy of England against an English statesman—whensoever it chances that those accusations are uncorroborated. King JAMES himself (it may here be added), when looking back at this mysterious transaction some years later, and in one of his Anti-Spanish moods—said to Sir Robert: ‘The Spaniard is a juggling jack. I believe he forged those letters;’ alluding, as the context suggests, to the papers—whatever they were—which GONDOMAR showed to COTTON at the outset of their intercourse, in order to induce him to act as an intermediary between himself and the Earl of SOMERSET.

At this time, the ground was already trembling beneath SOMERSET’S feet, though he little suspected the source of his real danger. He knew, ere long, that an attempt would be made to charge him with embezzling jewels of the Crown. In connection with this charge there was a State secret, in which Sir Robert COTTON was a participant with SOMERSET, and with the King himself. And a secret it has remained. Such jewels, it is plain, were in SOMERSET’S hands, and by him were transferred to those of COTTON. Few persons who have had occasion to look closely into the surviving documents and correspondence which bear upon the subsequent and famous trials for the murder of OVERBURY, will be likely to doubt that the secret was one among those ‘alien matters’ of which SOMERSET was so urgently and so repeatedly adjured and warned, by JAMES’S emissaries, to avoid all mention, should he still persist (despite the royal, repeated, and almost passionate, entreaties with which he was beset) in putting himself upon his trial; instead of pleading guilty, after his wife’s example, and trusting implicitly to the royal mercy.

For the purpose of warding off the lesser, but foreseen, danger, COTTON advised the Earl to take a step of which the Crown lawyers made subsequent and very effective use, in order to preclude all chance of his escape from the unforeseen and greater danger. [Sidenote: 1615. July.] By Sir Robert’s recommendation he obtained from the King permission to have a pardon drawn, in which, amongst other provisions, it was granted that no account whatever should be exacted from SOMERSET at the royal exchequer; and to that pardon the King directed the Chancellor to affix the Great Seal. The Seal, however, was withheld, and a remarkable scene ensued in the Council Chamber. There are extant two or three narratives of the occurrence, which agree pretty well in substance. Of these GONDOMAR’S is the most graphic. The incident took place on the 20th of August. The despatch in which it is minutely described was written on the 20th of October. There is reason to believe that the Ambassador drew his information from an eye-witness of what passed.

‘As the King was about to leave the Council Board,’ writes GONDOMAR, ‘SOMERSET made to him a speech which, as I was told, had been preconcerted between them. [Sidenote: THE SCENE IN THE COUNCIL CHAMBER, RESPECTING THE PARDON DRAWN BY SIR R. COTTON FOR SOMERSET.] He said that the malice of his enemies had forced him to ask for a pardon; adduced arguments of his innocency; and then besought the King to command the Chancellor to declare at once what he had to allege against him, or else to put the seal to the pardon. [Sidenote: 1615. August.] The King, without permitting anything to be spoken, said a great deal in SOMERSET’S praise; asserted that the Earl had acted rightly in asking for a pardon, which it was a pleasure to himself to grant—although the Earl would certainly stand in no need of it in his days—on the Prince’s account, who was then present.’ Here, writes GONDOMAR, the King placed his hand on the Prince’s shoulder, and added—‘That he may not undo what I have done.’ Then, turning to the Chancellor, the King ended with the words: ‘And so, my Lord Chancellor, put the seal to it; for such is my will.’ The Chancellor, instead of obeying, threw himself on his knees, told the King that the pardon was so widely drawn that it made SOMERSET (as Lord Chamberlain) absolute master of ‘jewels, hangings, tapestry, and of all that the palace contained; seeing that no account was to be demanded of him for anything.’ And then the Chancellor added: ‘If your Majesty insists upon it, I entreat you to grant me a pardon also for passing it; otherwise I cannot do it.’ On this the King grew angry, and with the words, ‘I order you to pass it, and you must pass it,’ left the Council Chamber. His departure in a rage, before the pardon was sealed, gave SOMERSET’S enemies another opportunity by which they did not fail to profit. They had the Queen on their side. On that very day, too, the King set out on a progress, long before arranged. For the time the matter dropped. Before the Ambassador of Spain took up his pen to tell the story to his Court, VILLIERS, ‘the new favourite,’ had begun to supplant his rival; so that the same despatch which narrates the beginnings of the fall of SOMERSET, tells also of the first stage in the rapid rise of BUCKINGHAM.

[Sidenote: THE SECOND PARDON DRAWN BY COTTON. 1615, Sept.]

About a month after this wrangling at the Council Board, SOMERSET again advised with Sir Robert COTTON on the same subject. [Sidenote: _Report of the Trial of the Earl of Somerset._ (MS. R. H.)] COTTON recommended him to have the Pardon renewed; saying to the Earl, ‘In respect you have received some disgrace in the opinion of the world, in having passed’ [_i. e._ missed] ‘that pardon which in the summer you desired, and seeing there be many precedents of larger pardons, I would have you get one after the largest precedent; that so, by that addition, you may recover your honour.’ Strangely as these closing words now sound, in relation to such a matter, they seem to embody both the feeling and the practice of the times.

In another version of the proceedings at the trial of May, 1616, SOMERSET is represented as using in the course of his defence these words: ‘To Sir Robert COTTON I referred the whole drawing and despatch of the Pardon.’ And again: ‘I first sought the Pardon by the motion and persuasion of Sir Robert COTTON, who told me in what dangers great persons honoured with so many royal favours had stood, in former times.’ [Sidenote: MS. Report of Trial (R. H.)] Sir Robert’s own account of this and of many correlative matters of a still graver sort has come down to us only in garbled fragments and extracts from his examinations, such as it suited the purposes of the law-officers of the Crown to make use of, after their fashion. The original documents were as carefully suppressed, as COTTON’S appearance in person at the subsequent trial was effectually hindered. At that day it was held to be an unanswerable reason for the non-appearance of a witness,—whatever the weight of his testimony,—to allege that he was regarded by the Crown as ‘a delinquent,’ and could not, therefore, be publicly questioned upon ‘matters of State.’ There is little cause to marvel that a scrutinising reader of the _State Trials_ (in their published form) is continually in doubt whether what he reads ought to be regarded as sober history, or as wild and, it may be, venomous romance.

One other incident of 1615 needs to be noticed before we proceed to the catastrophe of the Gondomar story.

[Sidenote: 1615. May 24.]

In May of this year Sir Robert wrote a letter to Prince CHARLES, which is notable for the contrasted advice, in respect to warlike pursuits, which it proffers to the new Prince, from that more famous advice which had but recently been offered to his late brother. [Sidenote: Comp. MS. Cott. Cleop. F. vi, § 1. ‘_An Answer ... to certain military men, &c._, (April, 1609).] He had lately found, he tells Prince CHARLES, a very ancient volume containing the principal passages of affairs between the two kingdoms of England and France under the reigns of King HENRY THE THIRD and King HENRY THE FIFTH, and had caused a friend of his to abstract from it the main grounds of the claim of the Kings of England to the Crown of France; translating the original Latin into English. This he now dedicates to the Prince, ‘as a piece of evidence concerning that title which, at the time when God hath appointed, shall come unto you.’ He ends his letter in a strain more than usually rhetorical:—‘This title hath heretofore been pleaded in France, as well by ordinary arguments of civil and common law, as also by more sharp syllogisms of cannons in the field. There have your noble ancestors, Kings of this realm, often argued in arms; there have been their large chases; there, their pleasant walks; there have they hewed honour out of the sides of their enemies; there—in default of peaceable justice—they have carried the cause by sentence of the sword. [Sidenote: Sir R. Cotton to Prince Charles. (MS. Lansd. 223. fol. 7.) (Copy.) (B. M.)] God grant that your Highness may, both in virtues and victories, not only imitate, but far excel them.’

[Sidenote: The King to Archbishop of Canterbury, &c. _Domestic Corresp._ James I, vol. lxxxvi, § 16. (R. H.)]

The royal commission for the first examination of COTTON was issued on the 26th of October, 1615. Two months afterwards he was committed to the custody of one of the Aldermen of London. His library and papers were also searched.

COTTON’S accusation was that of having communicated papers and secrets of State to the Spanish Ambassador. He was subjected to repeated examinations, which (as we have seen) are extant only in part. He maintained his innocence of all intentional offence. [Sidenote: COTTON’S EXAMINATIONS BY COMMISSION Jan.-April, 1616.] ‘The King,’ he said, ‘gave me instruction to speak as I did. If I misunderstood His Majesty my fault was involuntary. I followed the King’s instruction to the best of my belief and recollection.’ The examiners, however, were more intent by far on extracting something from COTTON that would tell against SOMERSET, than on the punishment of the fallen favourite’s ally and agent. COKE, in particular, was indefatigable in the task. It was as congenial to him as was the study of BRACTON or of LITTLETON.

What then must have been his delight when,—whilst attending a sermon at Paul’s Cross,—word was brought to him which gave hope of a discovery of SOMERSET’S most secret correspondence? The pending proceedings had stirred men’s minds in city and suburb, as well as at Court. A London merchant had been asked, a little while before, to take into his charge a box of papers. The depositor was a woman of the middle class, with whom his acquaintance was but slight. At that time there was nothing in the incident to excite suspicion. But, at a moment when strange rumours were afloat, the depositor suddenly requested the return of the deposit. The merchant bethought himself that the circumstances now looked mysterious. If the papers should chance to bear on matters of State, to have had any concern with them, howsoever innocent, might be dangerous. He carried the box to Sir Edward COKE’S chambers. Not a moment was lost in apprising the absent lawyer of the incident. Such news was of more interest than the sermon. Probably, the preacher had not finished his exordium, before all the faculties of COKE and of a fellow-commissioner were bent on the letters which had passed between SOMERSET and NORTHAMPTON.

If GONDOMAR is to be believed, some secret papers belonging to King JAMES himself were part of the precious spoil.[9]

As usual, there are two accounts of the original secretor of the papers so opportunely discovered. According to one of them, the box was delivered by SOMERSET’S own order to the woman by whom it was carried to the London merchant. [Sidenote: COTTON’S DEALINGS WITH SOMERSET’S CORRESPONDENCE.] [Sidenote: 1615.] According to another, SOMERSET entrusted the papers to COTTON; and the latter, anticipating the search and sealing up of his library, gave them to a female acquaintance with whom he thought they would remain in safety, but whose own fears led her to shift their custody, in her turn.

That the letters which NORTHAMPTON had received from SOMERSET—containing, amongst many other things, numerous references to the imprisonment of OVERBURY in the Tower—had been in Sir Robert COTTON’S hands is unquestioned. After NORTHAMPTON’S death, COTTON, to use his own words, had been ‘permitted to peruse and oversee all the writings, books, &c. in the Earl’s study.’ In the course of this examination he proceeds to say, ‘I had collected thirty several letters of my Lord of SOMERSET to the Earl of Northampton, which, upon request, I delivered to my Lord Treasurer [the Earl of SUFFOLK,] who sent them to the Earl of SOMERSET.’ SUFFOLK, it is to be remembered, was NORTHAMPTON’S heir.

Thus far, no charge rests upon COTTON in relation to this correspondence. What he did in disposing of SOMERSET’S letters was done by order of the representatives of their deceased owner. It is far otherwise with respect to their treatment after they had repassed, by SUFFOLK’S gift, into the hands of SOMERSET, their writer.

The letters were undated. That they should be so was in accordance with the practice of a majority of the letter-writers of the time—as students of history know to their sorrow. [Sidenote: Extracts of Examinations, &c. (R. H.).] When suspicion was aroused and inquiry commenced about the real cause of OVERBURY’S death, COTTON’S advice was sought by SOMERSET. He told me, says SOMERSET himself: ‘These letters of yours may be dated, so as may clear you of all imputation.’ Did he mean that the dates might be forged, and so be made to bear false witness? Or did he mean that, by putting their true dates to the letters, their contents would exculpate an innocent man? To these questions there is absolutely no answer, save the presumptive answer of character.[10]

Whatever may be our estimate of the difficulty attending on the admission of such exculpation as that, in respect of a charge which amounts (in substance) to participation, after the fact, in the crime of murder, there is really now no alternative. That Sir Robert COTTON put dates to SOMERSET’S undated letters is certain. It was found to be absolutely impossible, after desperate effort, to prove that the dates were false. It is alike impossible to prove that they are true. These dates are in COTTON’S own hand, without any attempt to disguise it.

Upon the hypothesis of SOMERSET’S guilt, the question is beset with as much difficulty, as upon the hypothesis of his innocence. By procuring OVERBURY’S imprisonment—with whatever motive, or beneath whatever influence—SOMERSET had brought himself under inevitable suspicion of complicity in the ultimate result of that imprisonment. He was already within the web. His struggles made it only the more tangled.

Sir Robert COTTON remained in custody until the middle of the year 1616. He was effectually prevented from appearing in May of that year as a witness at his friend’s trial. [Sidenote: _Domestic Corresp._ James I, vol. lxxxvii, f. 67 (R. H.).] He was himself put to no form of trial whatever. But he had to purchase his pardon at the price of five hundred pounds. It received the Great Seal on the 16th July. [Sidenote: Bacon to Villiers, Feb. 1; and April 18; 1616.] Remembering BACON’S share in each stage of the proceedings against SOMERSET, and the lavishness of his professions to VILLIERS of the extreme delight he felt in following the lead of the new favourite throughout every step of the prosecution of the old one, it is suggestive to note that the framers, five years afterwards, of a pardon for the Lord Chancellor BACON were directed to follow the precedent of the pardon granted in July 1616 to Sir Robert COTTON.

Nor is it of less interest to observe that, to some of Sir Robert COTTON’S closest friends, it seemed—at the moment when every part of the matter was fresh in men’s minds—that it was much more needful for him to exonerate himself from a suspicion of having stood beside SOMERSET too lukewarmly, than to clear himself from the charge of committing a forgery in order to cloke a murder. Very significant, for example, are the words of one of those friends which I find in a letter addressed to COTTON on the very day on which his pardon passed the Great Seal:—‘If I say I rejoice and gratulate to you your return to your own house, as I did lament your captivity, ... it will easily be credited.... The unsureness of this collusive world, and the danger of great friendships, you have already felt; and may truly say, with holy DAVID, _Nolite fidere in principibus_.... As I hear, you have begun to make good use of it, by receiving to you your Lady which God himself had knit unto you. It is a piety for which you are commended. And, were it not for one thing I should think my comfort in you were complete.... _It is said you were not sufficiently sincere to your most trusting friend, the pitied Earl. [Sidenote: E. Bolton to Sir R. Cotton; Cott. MS. Julius C., iii, fol. 32. (B. M.)] Though I hold this a slander, yet being not able to make particular defences, I opposed my general protestation against it as an injury to my friend._ Yet wanting apt countermines to meet with those close works by which some seek to blow up a breach into your honour, I was not a little afflicted.... I leave the arming of me in this cause to your own pleasure.’

The caution as to the danger of the friendships of grandees and great favourites was one which COTTON took to heart. In the years to come he had occasionally to give critical advice, in critical junctures. But, in the true sense of the words, he learnt, at last, not to put his trust in Princes. Long before his acquaintance with SOMERSET and his private conferences with JAMES, a very true and dear friend had noted a dangerous proclivity in Sir Robert’s character. [Sidenote: Arthur Agarde to Sir R. Cotton: Cott. MS. Julius C., iii, fol. 1.] It prompted, by way of counsel, the words: ‘Be yourself; and no man’s creature; but [only] God’s. And so He will prosper all your designs, both to his glory and your good.’

That ply had been taken too deeply, however, to be very easily smoothed out. In the years to come Sir Robert COTTON approached—more than once, perhaps—the brink of the old peril. As BUCKINGHAM clomb higher and higher, and busied himself with many transactions of the nature of which he had but a very insecure mental grasp, he felt his need of the counsels of experienced men. He made occasional advances to COTTON, amongst others. They were met; and not always so warily, as might now have been expected.

But against the danger which over-confiding intercourse with too-powerful courtiers was sure to bring in its train, COTTON found a better safeguard in wounded self-esteem, than even in dearbought experience. He soon saw that in BUCKINGHAM’S character there was at least as much of vacillation as of versatility. The famous lines which describe the son as

A man so various, that he seem’d to be Not one, but all mankind’s epitome,

would have a spice of truth if applied to the father. But their applicability is only partial; whereas the lines which follow are almost as true—a single word excepted—of the first Duke of Buckingham as they were of the second—

Stiff in opinions; often in the wrong; He’s everything by starts, and nothing long.

When Sir Robert COTTON perceived that James’s new favourite would listen, in the morning, to grave advice on a grave subject, and affirm his resolution to act upon it; and yet, in the afternoon suffer himself to be carried from his purpose by the silly jests or malicious suggestions of youngsters and sycophants, unacquainted with affairs and often reckless of consequences, he saw the wisdom of standing somewhat aloof. He rarely, however, refused his advice, when it was asked. In regard to matters of naval administration,—the authoritative value of his opinion on which was now everywhere recognised, save in the dockyards and their dependencies,—he gave it with especial willingness. But henceforward, to use AGARDE’S words, he was ‘no man’s creature.’

Five years passed on, marked by events which stirred England to its core, but to Sir Robert COTTON they were years of comparative quiet. He was, indeed, very far from being a careless bystander. He observed much, and learnt much. [Sidenote: GROWTH OF COTTON’S LITERARY AND PUBLIC CORRESPONDENCE.] Had it not been for the lessons which those publicly eventful years impressed on his receptive mind, he might have gone to his grave with no other reputation than that of a profound antiquary, and the Founder of the Cottonian Library.

Meanwhile, his pen worked as hard in the service of scholars, both at home and abroad, as though he had been a busy proof-reader in a leading printing-office. He supplied, at the same time, on the right hand and on the left, precedents and formulæ, with a diligence and readiness which would have won both fame and fortune for a long-accustomed conveyancer. CAMDEN consults him, continually, for help in his historical labours. Ben JONSON puts questions to him about intricate points of Roman geography. [Sidenote: MS. Cott., Julius C., iii, fol. 239. (B. M.)] William LISLE seeks COTTON’S aid in the prosecution of his studies of the language and literature of the Anglo-Saxons. [Sidenote: _Ib._, fol. 288, seqq.] PEIRESC consults him on questions in Numismatics. [Sidenote: _Domestic Corresp._, Jas. I, vol. lxxxi, § 15. (R. H.)] If great officers of State chance to quarrel amongst themselves about their respective claims to carry before the King the sword _Curtana_, at some special ceremony, they agree to refer the dispute to Sir Robert COTTON and to abide—without fighting a duel—by his momentous decision. If a courtier obtains for a friend the royal promise of an Irish viscounty he writes to COTTON, asking him to choose an appropriate and well-sounding title. [Sidenote: MS. Cott., Julius C., iii, fol. 378.] Roger MAYNWARING begs him to determine the legal amount of burial-fees. [Sidenote: _Ib._, fol. 252.] Dr. LAMBE asks him to settle conflicting pretensions to the advowson of a living which, in old time, belonged to an abbey. [Sidenote: _Ib._, fol. 229.] Augustine VINCENT implores his help in a tough question about patents of peerage. [Sidenote: _Ib._, fol. 379.] The Lord Keeper WILLIAMS seeks advice on questions of parliamentary form and privilege. [Sidenote: Edwards’ _Life and Letters of Ralegh_, vol. ii, p. 321.] RALEGH writes to him, from that ‘Bloody Tower’ which he was about to turn into a literary shrine for all generations of Englishmen to come, by composing in it a noble ‘History of the World’—beseeching him to supply a desolate prisoner with historical materials. [Sidenote: MS. Julius C. iii, fol. 204.] The Earl of ARUNDEL writes to him from Padua, begging that he would compile ‘the story of my ancestors.’ [Sidenote: _Ib._, fol. 320.] The Earl of DORSET entreats him to make out a list of the gifts which some early SACKVILLE had piously bestowed upon the Church—not, however, with the smallest intention of himself increasing them. And, anon, there comes to Sir Robert, from a third great peer, the second of the Cecil Earls of Salisbury, an entreaty—expressed in terms so urgent that one might call it a supplication—‘Permit me, I pray you, to see my Lord of NORTHAMPTON’S letters.... [Sidenote: Salisbury to Cotton, in MS. Cott., Julius C., iii.] I will return them unread, and unseen, by anybody,’ save himself. And then the Secretary of State writes to him in an impetuous hurry which made his letter scarcely legible:—‘If you be not here’ [_i. e._ at the Council Chamber] ‘with those precedents for which there is present use, we are all undone. [Sidenote: MS. Cott., Julius C., iii, fol. 57.] For His Majesty doth so chide, that I dare not come in his sight.’

Along with this busy correspondence—of which, in these brief sentences I have given the reader but a very inadequate and scanty sample—the surviving records of these years of comparative retirement supply us with abundant notices of the growth and of the sources, from time to time, of the Cottonian Library. It would be no unwelcome task to tell that story at length. It would, indeed, be but the paying, in very humble coin, of a debt of gratitude to a liberal benefactor. But within the compass of these pages so many careers have to be narrated that the due proportions of some of them—and even of one so interesting as COTTON’S—must needs be closely shorn. On this point it must, for the present, suffice to say that the acquisition of many Cottonian State Papers, and of such as carry on their face the most irrefragable marks of former official ownership, can be distinctly traced. The assertion is no hasty or inconsiderate one. It is founded on an acquaintance with the Cottonian MSS., which is now, I fear, thirty years old, and on the strength of which (when reading some recent assaults on the fair fame of their Collector), I have been tempted to put certain well-known lines into Sir Robert’s mouth:—

If I am Traduced by o’er hasty tongues—which neither know My faculties nor person, yet will be The chroniclers of my doing—let me say ’Tis but the fate of place, and the rough brake That virtue must go through.

Were it not, however, for one pregnant circumstance in Sir Robert COTTON’S subsequent life, all this would have but a very meager attractiveness for nineteenth-century readers. The story of the growth of a great library has its charm, but the sphere of potency is of small dimension. Few but those who are themselves imbued with a spice of literary antiquarianism ever enter within the narrow circle. Just in like manner, that active literary and political correspondence—spreading from Exeter to Durham, and from Venice to Copenhagen—would nowadays have but a slender interest for anybody (not belonging to the scorned fraternity of Oldbuck and Dryasdust), were it not for that great war between King and Parliament, Cavalier and Roundhead, of which, in one sense, COTTON lived only long enough to see the gathering of forces, and the early skirmishes, but in which, nevertheless, he played a part second only to that played by ELIOT and by PYM. His close connection with the Parliamentarian leaders of 1625–1629 lifts the whole story of the man out of the petty circuit of mere ‘curiosities of literature,’ into the broad arena of the hard-won liberties of England.

[Sidenote: COTTON’S ALLIANCE WITH THE PARLIAMENTARIAN CHIEFS.]

All students of the deeds done in that arena now know—and their knowledge is in no slight degree due to the persistent labours of a living writer—that the battle of the ‘Petition of Right’ was even a greater battle than Naseby or Marston Moor. They know that the marshalling of the forces which, at a period antecedent to that famous Petition, succeeded in winning a safe place on ‘the fleshy tables’ of the hearts of Englishmen for those political immunities it embodied—after the first written record had been vainly torn from the Council Book—was a feat of arms not less brilliant, in its way, than was that arraying of Ironsides, on much later days of the long strife, which resulted in ‘Darwen stream with blood of Scots imbued,’ and placed Worcester’s laureat wreath on the brow of CROMWELL. There are many senses in which we have all of us (or nearly all) learnt to see the truth of the familiar words, ‘Peace hath her victories, not less renown’d than War,’ but in no sense have those words a deeper truth than when we simply invert MILTON’S own application of them. By him they were pointed at something yet to be done, and which, as he hoped, might be done by CROMWELL. Nowadays, the historian has good ground to point them at an earlier victory, won when the great soldier was but looking on at the parliamentary contest, which he could not much advance, and might very possibly have seriously impeded. The one thing which has transmuted Robert COTTON from the status of a dead antiquary into that of a living English worthy, is his close fellowship with ELIOT, RUDYARD, and PYM. His rights to a place amongst our national worthies is due—more than all else—to the fact that the services which he rendered in that strife of heroes were services which one man, and only one, throughout broad England had made himself capable of rendering. COTTON could no more have led the parliamentary phalanx, than he could have led the Ironsides. To stir men’s minds as ELIOT or PYM could stir them was about as much in his power as it was to have invented logarithms, or to have written ‘_Lear_.’ But if he could not command the army, he could furnish the arsenal. At that day and under the then circumstances that service was priceless.

Sir Robert COTTON’S best and most memorable parliamentary service was rendered under CHARLES; not under JAMES. But there is one incident in his public career which occurred just before the change in the wearers of the Crown that has a claim to mention, even in so brief a memoir as this.

Among the revenges wrought by the ‘whirligigs of time’ before JAMES went to his grave, was the necessity laid upon him to direct a search for precedents how best to put a mark of disgrace on a Spanish Ambassador for misconduct in his office. The man selected by the Duke of Buckingham to make the search, and to report upon it, was Sir Robert COTTON. Some weeks before he had been chosen to draw up, in the name of both Houses of Parliament, a formal address to the King for the rupture of the Spanish match.

[Sidenote: THE SEARCH FOR PRECEDENTS AGAINST AMBASSADORS.]

When BUCKINGHAM made that famous speech at the Conference of Lords and Commons on the relations between England and Spain, to which COTTON’S well-known _Remonstrance of the treaties of Amity and Marriage of the Houses of Austria and Spain with the Kings of England_,[11] was to serve as a preface, he spoke with considerable force and incisiveness. [Sidenote: 1624. 27 April.] His arguments were not hampered by many anxieties about consistency with his own antecedents. His words were chosen with a view to clinch his arguments to English minds rather than to spare Spanish susceptibilities. The ambassadors—there were then, I think, two of them—were furious at a degree of plain-speaking to which they had been little accustomed. They appealed to the King. They knew that the versatile favourite, once loved, was now dreaded. They tried to work on the King’s cowardice. The Duke, they told His Majesty, had plotted the calling of Parliament expressly to have a sure tool with which to keep him in control, should he prove refractory to the joint schemes of the Duke and Prince CHARLES. ‘They will confine your Majesty’s sacred person,’ said they, ‘to some place of pleasure, and transfer the regal power upon the Prince.’

The framing of such an accusation, writes Sir Robert, in the Report which he addressed to BUCKINGHAM on ‘_Proceedings against Ambassadors have miscarried themselves_,’ would, by the laws of the realm, amount to High Treason, had it been made by a subject. [Sidenote: _Relation of Proceedings, &c._; MS. LANSD., 811, ff. 133–139.] He then adduces a long string of precedents for the treatment of offending envoys; advises that the Spaniards should first be immediately confined to their own abode; and should then, by the Speakers of both Houses of Parliament, in person, be exhorted and required to ‘make a fair discovery of the ground that led them so to inform the King.’

If, says Sir Robert, they refuse—‘as I believe they will’—then are they authors of the scandal, and His Majesty should be addressed to send a ‘letter of complaint to the King of Spain, requiring justice to be done according to the law of nations, which claim should the King of Spain refuse, the refusal would amount to a declaration of war.’ This advice was given by COTTON to the Duke on the 27th of April, 1624. Its author’s momentary favour with the favourite of the now fast-rising sun was destined (as we shall see presently) to be of extremely brief duration.

Pen-service of this sort was eminently congenial with Sir Robert COTTON’S powers. To his vast knowledge of precedents he added much acumen and just insight in their application. Though never admitted to the Privy Council as a sworn councillor of the Crown, his service as an adviser on several great emergencies was conspicuous.

And it did not stand alone. Small as were his natural gifts for oratory, COTTON’S earnestness in the strife of politics prompted him, more than once, to put aside his own sense of his disadvantages, and to endeavour himself to strike a good blow, with the weapons which he knew so well how to choose for others. [Sidenote: COTTON’S SPEECH IN THE PARLIAMENT AT OXFORD.] On one of these occasions he prepared a speech which proved very effective.

[Sidenote: 1625. 10 August.]

Curiously enough, whilst the best contemporary reports of that speech agree amongst themselves in substance; they differ as to the name of the speaker by whom it was actually uttered within the walls of the House of Commons. Internal evidence and external authority are also agreed that the speech, if not spoken, was at all events prepared by Sir Robert COTTON. On that point, all parties coincide. But according to one account, he both wrote and uttered it. According to another, he wrote it; but was prevented from the intended delivery,—either by an accidental absence from the House, or by some inward and unwaivable misgiving which led him at the eleventh hour to hand over the task to the able and well-accustomed tongue of his comrade ELIOT.

[Sidenote: COTTON’S? OR ELIOT’S?]

If we turn, for help—in our strait—to the admirable biography of ELIOT, by Mr. FORSTER, we shall find that its author rather accepts the doubt, than solves it. Inclining to the opinion that Sir John ELIOT was the actual utterer, he thinks nevertheless that the best course is to ‘let the speech stand double and inseparable; a memorial of a fast friendship.’ It was the friendship, I may add, of two statesmen who fought a good fight, side by side; until one of them was violently torn out of the arena, and thrust into a dungeon, in the hope that slow disease might unstring the eloquent tongue which honours could not bribe, and terrors could not silence.

In Sir Robert’s posthumous tracts (as they were published by James HOWELL) this speech has been printed as unquestionably spoken by him who wrote it. But that publication—as I have had occasion to show already, in relation to the ‘_Twenty-four Arguments_’—carries no grain of authority. Spoken or simply composed by its author, the speech is alike memorable in English history, and in the personal life of the man himself.

The existence of the plague in London had led to the adjournment of the first Parliament of King CHARLES to Oxford. It was there, and on the 10th of August, 1625, that the speech which—whether it came from the lips of John ELIOT or of Robert COTTON—made a deep impression on the House, was spoken. It gave the key-note to not a few speeches of a subsequent date, and it contains passages which, in the event, came to have on their face something of the stamp of prophecy.

Retrenchment in expenditure,—Parliamentary curb on Royal favourites,—No trust of a transcendent power to any one Minister,—Less lavishness in the bestowal of honours and dignities won by suit, or purchase, rather than by public meed,—Wary distrust of Spain,—Abolition of unjust monopolies and oppressive imposts;—these are amongst the earnest counsels which (whether it were as writer, or as speaker) Sir Robert COTTON impressed on his fellow-members in that memorable sitting at Oxford. Both the pith and the sting of the Speech may be found in its concluding words: ‘His Majesty hath ... wise, religious, and worthy servants.... In loyal duty, we offer our humble desires that he would be pleased to advise with them _together; ... not with young and single counsel_.’ Well would it have been for CHARLES, had he taken those simple words to heart, in good time.

To us, and now, there is a special interest in an incidental passage of this speech which relates to SOMERSET. The reader has seen how Count GONDOMAR’S secret testimony—just disinterred from Simancas—against SOMERSET, as well as against COTTON, has recently been dealt with by an eminent historian. [Sidenote: (See, also, heretofore, the foot-note to p. 73.)] It is worth our while to remember some other words on that subject spoken publicly in the Parliament at Oxford almost two centuries and a half agone. They were spoken in the ears of men whose eyes had looked with keen scrutiny into the Spanish envoy as well as into the English minister. SOMERSET was still living. Men who then sat in the Parliament Chamber knew every incident in his official life, and not a few incidents in his private life, as well as every charge by which—publicly or privately—he had been infamed. They knew, exactly, Sir Robert COTTON’S position towards the fallen minister. If we choose to suppose that ELIOT was now speaking what COTTON wrote, the inference is unchanged. To those listeners Sir John and Sir Robert were known to be politically ‘double and inseparable.’

[Sidenote: COTTON’S EULOGY ON LORD SOMERSET’S POLICY (August, 1625).]

The facts being so, what is the course taken by the speaker when he finds occasion to remind the House of things that happened when ‘My Lord of Somerset stood in state of grace, and had the trust of the Signet Seal?’ Does he take a line of apology and use words of extenuation? Not a whit. In the presence of some of the wisest and ablest of English statesmen, he eulogises SOMERSET as an honest and unselfish minister of the Crown. He asserts, that the Earl had discovered ‘the double dealings’ of Spanish emissaries, and the dangers of the Spanish alliance; and had made some progress in dissuading even King JAMES from putting faith in Spaniards. Then, winding up this episode, in order to pass to the topic of the hour, COTTON says: ‘Thus stood the effect of SOMERSET’S power with His Majesty, when the clouds of his misfortune fell upon him. What future advisers led to we may well remember. [Sidenote: MS. LANSD.,[12] 491, fol. 195.] The marriage with Spain was renewed; GONDOMAR declared an honest man; Popery heartened; His Majesty’s forces in the Palatinate withdrawn; His Highness’s children stripped of their patrimony; our old and fast allies disheartened; and the King our now master exposed to so great a peril as no wise and faithful counsel would ever have advised.’

At Court, speech such as this was deeply resented, instead of being turned to profit. A curious little incident which occurred at the Coronation of CHARLES in the next winter testifies, characteristically, to the effect which it produced on the minds both of the new King and of his favourite.

At the date of that ceremony, Sir Robert’s close political connection with the future Parliamentary chiefs was but in its infancy. His views of public policy were fast ripening, and had borne fruit. His private friendships were more and more shaping themselves into accordance with his tendencies in politics. Amongst those whose intimacy he cultivated—besides that of ELIOT and others who have been mentioned already—were Symonds D’EWES, and John SELDEN. [Sidenote: FRIENDS AND HOSPITALITIES.] It was at COTTON’S hospitable table, in Old Palace Yard, that the two men last named first made acquaintance with each other. Both were scholars; both were strongly imbued with the true antiquarian tinge; both had an extensive acquaintance with the black-letter lore of jurisprudence, as well as with the more elegant branches of archæology; and both, up to a certain point, had common aims in public life; yet they did not draw very near together. SELDEN’S more robust mind, and his wider sympathies, shocked some of the puritanic nicenesses of D’EWES. Precisely the same remark would hold good of the relations between COTTON and D’EWES. But a certain geniality of manners in Sir Robert, combined with his grandee-like openness of hand and mind, attracted his fellow-baronet in a degree which went some way towards vanquishing D’EWES’ most ingrained scruples. [Sidenote: Harl. MS., as above.] ‘I had much more familiarity with Sir Robert COTTON, than with Master SELDEN,’ jots down Sir Symonds in his Autobiographic _Diary_, and then he adds: ‘SELDEN being a man exceedingly puffed up with the apprehension of his own abilities.’ That last sentence,—as the reader, perhaps, will agree with me in thinking,—may possibly tell a more veracious tale of the writer, than of the man whom it reproves.

Be that as it may, the dining-room in Old Palace Yard witnessed frequent meetings of many groups of visitors of whose tabletalk it would be delightful could we find as good a record as we have of the tabletalk in Bolt Court, or at Streatham Park; or even as we have of almost contemporary talk around the board at Hawthornden. Glorious old Ben himself was a frequent guest at Sir Robert COTTON’S table. Until late in JAMES’ reign, CAMDEN, when his growing infirmities permitted him to journey up from Chislehurst, would still be seen there, now and again. During the rare sessions of Parliament, many a famous member, as he left the House of Commons, would join the circle. And the high discourse about Greeks and Romans, about poetry and archæology, would be pleasantly varied, by the newest themes of politics, by occasional threnodies on the exorbitant power of court minions, but also by occasional and glowing anticipations of a better time to come.

At one of these festive meetings, occurring not long before the Coronation of CHARLES THE FIRST, the talk seems to have turned on the coming solemnity. The plague at this time was still in London, though it was fast abating. [Sidenote: COTTON AND THE CORONATION OF CHARLES I.] That circumstance was to abridge the ceremonies, in order to permit the Court to leave Westminster more quickly; but it was known that great attention had been given by the King, personally, when framing the programme, to the strict observance of ancient forms. D’EWES was one of Sir Robert’s guests. Like his host, he had a great love for sight-seeing on public occasions. And they would both anticipate a special pleasure in witnessing the revival of certain coronation observances which had been pretermitted during two centuries. In regard to the coronation oath COTTON had been consulted, and he expected to be present, carrying in his hand his own famous copy of the Gospels known as the ‘_Evangeliary of King Ethelstan_.’ It was also expected that the watergate of Cotton House would be the King’s landing-place, and that he would cross the garden in order that he might enter the Palace more conveniently than he could from its usual stairs, then under repair, or in need of it. Sir Robert invited D’EWES, with other of his guests—not privileged to claim places in Westminster Abbey on the great occasion—that at least they might see their new sovereign, as he passed to take his crown.

When the morning came D’EWES was early in his visit, but, he found Cotton House already filled with ladies. The Earl Marshal had decorated the stairs to the river and the watergate very handsomely. Sir Robert had done his part by decorating his windows, and his garden, more handsomely still. But to the chagrin alike of the fair spectators and of their host, as they were standing, in all their bravery, from watergate to housedoor, to do respectful obeisance, the royal barge, by the King’s own commandment—given at the moment, but pre-arranged by BUCKINGHAM—was urged onward. To our amazement, writes Sir Symonds, ‘we saw the King’s barge pass to the ordinary stairs, belonging to the backyard of the Palace, where the landing was dirty ... and the incommodity was increased by the royal barge dashing into the ground and sticking fast, before it touched the causeway.’ [Sidenote: D’Ewes; in Harl. MS., 646, as before.] His Majesty, followed by the Favourite, had to leap across the mud,—certainly an unusual incident in a coronation show.

When COTTON—swallowing the mortification which he must have felt, on behalf of his bevy of fair visitors, if not on his own—presently showed himself in the Abbey, bearing the _Evangeliary_, he and it were contemptuously thrust aside.

As a straw tells the turn of the wind, this trivial incident points to a policy. The insults both within the Abbey and without, had been planned, by the King and Duke, in order to mark the royal indignation at the close fellowship of COTTON with ELIOT and the other Parliamentary leaders. That the insults might be the more keenly felt, the Earl Marshal was left in ignorance of the plan. It is a help to the truthful portraiture of CHARLES, as well as to that of BUCKINGHAM, to note that to insult a group of English ladies was no drawback to the pleasure of putting a marked affront upon a political opponent. Perhaps, it increased the zest, from the probable near relationship of some among them to the offender.

But it is more important to note that another and graver intention in respect to Sir Robert COTTON had been already formed. It was in contemplation to do, in 1626, what was not really done until 1629. [Sidenote: Mede to Stuteville; MS. Harl., 383, 18 April, 1626.] BUCKINGHAM had advised the King to put the royal seals on the Cottonian Library. That done, he thought, there would surely be an end to the communication of formidable precedents for parliamentary warfare. More wary counsellors however interposed with wiser advice. A fitting pretext was lacking. Slenderness in the pretext would be no serious obstacle to

## action. But some excuse there must be. The project, though abandoned for

the time, will be seen to have its value when considering, presently, the strange story which is told, in the Privy Council Book, of the ‘_Proposition to bridle the impertinency of Parliaments_,’ and when narrating the sequel of that high-handed act of power, which brought COTTON’S head—as yet scarcely gray—with sorrow to the grave.

[Sidenote: ADVICE TO PRIVY COUNCIL ON CHANGE OF COINAGE.]

Although, thus early in the reign of CHARLES, a court insult was inflicted upon Sir Robert COTTON, after a fashion the extreme silliness of which rather serves to set off the intended malignity than to cloke it, only a few months passed before his advice was called for in presence of the Council Board, on an important question of home policy. The question raised was that of an alteration of the coinage. The Privy Council was divided in opinion. There was a desire for the advice of statesmen who were not at the Board, but who were known to have studied a subject beset with many difficulties. Among these, Sir Robert COTTON was consulted. He appeared at the Council Table on the 2nd of September, 1626, and we have a report of his speech to the Lords, which from several points of view is notable. [Sidenote: MS. LANSD., ff. 141–152. (B. M.)[13]] [Sidenote: _Council Registers_, James I, vols. v and vi, _passim_. (C. O.)] But a preliminary word or two needs to be said on what may seem the singularity that a man who, in 1625, was fighting zealously beside the Parliamentary patriots, should, in 1626, be speaking at the Council Table as a quasi-councillor of the Crown.

It might be sufficient to point attention to the obvious difference between questions affecting the liberty of the subject, and questions of mere administration, were this the only occasion—or were it a fair sample of the only class of occasions—in which COTTON appears as an unofficial Councillor. But the fact is otherwise. And it is best to be explained, partly, by the unsettled character of party connection during the political strife of CHARLES’ reign, as well as long afterwards, and

## partly by peculiarities belonging to the man himself. [Sidenote: _Life

of Sir John Eliot_, vol. i, p 468.] There are not many statesmen, even of that period, of whom it could be said as the able biographer of Sir John ELIOT says of Sir Robert COTTON: ‘He acted warmly with ELIOT and with the patriots in the first Parliament of CHARLES. At the opening of the third, he was tendering counsel to the King, _of which the obsequious forms have yet left no impression unfavourable to his uprightness and honour_.’ The result is unusual. How came it to pass?

Perhaps the preceding pages may have already suggested to the reader’s mind more than one possible and plausible answer to this question. Here it may suffice to say that while Sir Robert COTTON was plainly at one with the Parliamentarian leaders in the main points of their civil policy, he never went to the extreme lengths of the puritanic faith, either in things secular, or in matters pertaining to Religion. On some religious questions he differed from them widely. In secular matters, a tyrannic Parliament would have been as little to his liking as a despotic king. Neither friend nor enemy—GONDOMAR excepted—ever called him a Puritan (or pretended-Puritan) in his lifetime, any more than they would have called him a Republican. His ultimate divergence was not cloaked. It was no bar to the entire respect, or to the love and close fellowship, of men like ELIOT, just because it was frankly avowed, and had no selfish aim. COTTON,—had he lived long enough,—would probably have ranged himself, at last, with the Cavaliers, rather than with the Roundheads. He would have had FALKLAND’S misgivings, and FALKLAND’S sorrow, but I think he would not have lacked FALKLAND’S self-devotion also.

And, in another point, he resembled Lord FALKLAND. Both would have advised CHARLES to yield much of so-called ‘prerogative.’ Neither of them would have bade him to yield a grain of true royal honour. In later years, some words which COTTON wrote,—in 1627,—for the King’s eye may well have come back painfully into CHARLES’ memory:—‘To expiate the passion of the People,’ said Sir Robert, ‘with sacrifice of any of His Majesty’s servants, I have ever found to be no less fatal _to the Master_ than to the Minister, in the end.’

The question of the Coinage, on which he was called into Council in September 1626, had caused no small measure of discussion whilst JAMES was still on the throne. [Sidenote: THE ADVICE GIVEN BY SIR R. COTTON ON MINT AFFAIRS.] Many merchants of London had raised the old and hacknied cry of complaint against an alleged ‘vast transportation of gold and silver from England’ to the Continent. Others said that the complaint, if not groundless, was misdirected. The following Minute of the Privy Council will shew how the question stood in that early stage. It was drawn up in November, 1618.

[Sidenote: Council to the King, 30 Nov., 1618; James I, vol. iv, p. 45. (C. O.)]

‘Being by Your Majesty’s commandment to take into our consideration the state of the Mint and to advise of the way or means how to bring bullion more plentifully into the Kingdom, and to be coined there, as also how to stop the great exportation of treasure out of the Realm,—a matter of which the State hath been jealous: For our better information and Your Majesty’s satisfaction we thought it fit first to know from the Office of your Mint what quantity of gold and silver hath been there coined in the last seven years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth and the seven years last past of Your Majesty. And we find that in the said seven years of the Queen there was coined in gold and silver of all sorts £948,713 sterling, whereas in the seven late years of Your Majesty’s reign there hath been coined of all sorts, in gold and silver, £1,603,998. So as, comparing the one with the other, there hath been coined of both species in the said seven years of Your Majesty’s reign £655,285 sterling, more than in the seven years aforesaid of the Queen, the difference being almost three parts to one. Next we required a certificate from the Goldsmiths of London of the Plate that hath been made in those years within the City of London; and it appeareth that there was made and stamped in their hall the last seven years of Queen Elizabeth of silver plate the worth of £22,187 more than in the seven later years of Your Majesty’s reign. But upon the whole matter we cannot find and do humbly certify the same unto Your Majesty as our opinion that there hath been of late any such vast transportation of gold and silver into France and the Low Countries as was supposed; neither that there is any such notorious diminution of treasure generally in the Kingdom—at the least of gold—since it is apparent that there hath been a far greater quantity in the total coined within these seven years last past than in the last seven years of the late Queen. Besides Your Majesty may be pleased to observe that the making of so much silver plate cannot be the principal cause of the decay of the Mint since there was more plate made in London [in] those last seven years of the Queen,—when there came more silver to be coined in the Mint,—than there hath been used of late years, when silver in the Mint hath been so scarce though Gold more plentiful.... In the mean time we do humbly offer ... that there is no necessity ... to raise your coin, either in the one kind or in the other. [Sidenote: _Registers of Privy Council_, as above, p. 46. (C. O.)] But rather that the same may draw with it many inconveniences; and because the noise thereof through the City of London and from thence to other parts of the Realm, as we understand, hath already done hurt and in some measure interrupted and distracted the course of general commerce, we think it very requisite ... that some signification be forthwith made from this Table time to raise your coins.’

The course thus recommended—and in the recommendation the Council seems to have been well nigh unanimous—was precisely the course JAMES did not wish to take. The Council Books abound with proof how hard it was to dissuade the King from adopting this ‘intended project of enhancing the coin [_i. e._ by debasing the standard], though, as COTTON afterwards said at the Council Table, to do so would trench, both into the honour, the justice, and the profit’ [_i. e._ the real and ultimate profit] ‘of my royal Master very far.’

In his address at the Board, Sir Robert made an almost exhaustive examination of the history of the English Mint. He did it with much brevity and pith. His views about foreign trade are, of course, not free from the fallacies which were accepted as aphorisms by very nearly every statesman then living. But his advice on the immediate question at issue is marked by sound common sense, by insight and practical wisdom. [Sidenote: MS. LANSD., 811, ff. 148–152 (B. M.) [Compare the Report of Proceedings in the House of Commons, Feby. 1621. (_Parl. Hist._, vol. i, c. 1188–1194).]] His speech told, and he followed it up by framing, as Chairman of a Committee, (1) an _Answer to the Propositions delivered by some Officers of the Mint_; and (2) _Certain General Rules collected concerning Money and Bullion out of the late Consultation at Court_. Copies of both exist amongst the Harleian and Lansdowne MSS., and both, together with the Speech, are printed in the _Posthuma_ (although not without some of the Editor’s characteristic inaccuracies).

The next question which it was Sir Robert’s task to discuss before the Privy Council was a much more momentous question than that of the Coinage. It was, potentially, both to Sovereign and to people, an issue of life or death.

In January, 1628 [N. S.], he delivered, at the Board, the substance of the remarkable Discourse which has been more than once printed under the title, ‘_The Danger wherein this Kingdom now Standeth, and the Remedy_.’ [Sidenote: DISCOURSE ON THE CALLING OF A PARLIAMENT. 1628. Jany.] The courtliness of its tone no more detracts from its incisiveness of stroke, than a jewelled hilt would detract from the cleaving sweep of a Damascus blade, when wielded by well-knit sinews. It led instantly to the calling of the Parliament. [Sidenote: MS. LANSD., 254, ff. 258, seqq.] But neither its essential and true loyalty to the King, nor the opportune service which it rendered to the country was to make the fortunes of its author any exception to those which—sooner or later—befell every councillor of CHARLES THE FIRST, who, in substance if not in form, was wont to put Country before King.

In that third Parliament of CHARLES Sir Robert himself had no seat. In the Parliament which preceded it he sat for Old Sarum, having lost his seat for Huntingdonshire. But he continued to be the active ally and the influential councillor of the leaders of opposition to strained prerogatives. When the Parliament assailed Bishops NEILE and LAUD, the inculpated prelates, it is said, threw upon COTTON as much of their anger as they well could have done had he led the assault in person.

The opportunity was not very far to seek. [Sidenote: THE ‘PROPOSITION TO BRIDLE PARLIAMENTS.’ 1629. October.] Not long after the dissolution in March, 1629, of that Parliament of the assembling of which Sir Robert COTTON’S patriotic effort had been the immediate occasion, and to some of the effective blows of which he had helped to give vigour, some courtier or other brought to CHARLES’ hands a political tract, in manuscript, and told him that copies of it were in the possession of several statesmen. Those—with one exception—who were then named to the King were men wont to be held in greater regard in the country than at Court. The pamphlet bore for its title: ‘_The Proposicion for Your Majesties Service ... to secure your Estate and to bridle the impertinencie of Parliaments_.’

The consequences of this small incident were destined to prove of large moment. The earliest mention we have of it occurs in a letter written by the Archbishop of York—himself a Privy Councillor—to Sir Henry VANE, in November, 1629: ‘The Vice-Chancellor,’ says Archbishop HARSNET, ‘was sent to Sir Robert COTTON to seal up his library, and to bring himself before the Lords of the Council.’ [Sidenote: _Domest. Corresp._, Charles I, vol. cli, § 24. (R. H.)] In the words that follow the Archbishop is evidently speaking from what he had been told, not from his personal knowledge. ‘There was found,’ he proceeds to say, ‘in his custody a pestilential tractate which he had fostered as a child, containing a project how a Prince may make himself an absolute tyrant. [Sidenote: _Ib._] _This pernicious device he had communicated to divers Lords._’

CHARLES was presently in intense excitement about the matter. Its next stage cannot be better or more briefly told, than in the words which the King himself addressed to his assembled Councillors—in unusual array, for they were twenty-one in number—and afterwards caused to be entered upon the Council Book:

[Sidenote: 1629. 15 Nov.]

‘This day His Majestie, sitting in Counsell, was pleased to imparte to the whole Boarde the cause for which the [Sidenote: [_Council Register_, vol. v, p. 495.]] Erles of CLARE, SOMERSET, and BEDFORDE, Sir Robert COTTON, and sundry other persons of inferior qualitie, had bene lately restrained and examined by a speciall Committee appointed by him for that purpose, which cause was this:—

‘His Majestie declared that there came to his handes, by meere accedent, the coppie of a certain “_Discourse_” or “_The Proposicion_” (which was then, by his commandement, read at the Boarde), pretended to be written “for His Majesties service,” and bearing this title—”_The Proposicion for Your Majestie’s Service conteineth twoe partes: [Sidenote: PROCEEDINGS AGAINST SIR ROBERT COTTON IN THE PRIVY COUNCIL.] The one to secure your Estate, and to bridle the impertinencie of Parlements; the other to encrease Your Majestie’s Revenue much more then it is_.”

‘Now the meanes propounded in this Discourse for the effecting thereof are such as are fitter to be practised in a Turkish State then amongst Christians, being contrarie to the justice and mildnesse of His Majestie’s Government, and the synceritie of his intentions, and therefore cannot be otherwise taken then for a most scandalous invention, proceding from a pernitious dessein, both against His Majestie and the State, which, notwithstanding, the aforesaid persons had not onely read—and concealed the same from His Majestie and his Counsell—but also communicated and divulged it to others.

‘Whereupon His Majestie did farther declare that it is his pleasure that the aforesaid three Erles, and Sir Robert COTTON, shall answere this their offense in the Court of Star Chamber, to which ende they had alreadie bene summoned, and that now they shoulde be discharged and freed from their restraint and permitted to retourne to their severall houses, to the ende that they mighte have the better meanes to prepare themselves for their answere and defense.

‘And, lastly, he commanded that this his pleasure should be signified by the bearer unto them, who were then attending without,—having, for that purpose, bene sent for. His Majestie, having given this Order and direccion, rose from the Boarde, and when he was gone, the three Erles were called in severally and the Lorde Keeper signified to each of them His Majestie’s pleasure in that behalfe; shewing them, with all, how gratiously he had bene pleased to deale with them, both in the maner of the restraint, which was only during the time of the examination of the cause (a thing usuall and requisite specially in cases of that consequence), and in that they had bene committed to the custodie of eminent and honorable persons by whom they were treated according to their qualities; and lykewise in the discharge of them now from their restraint that they may have the better convenience and meanes to prepare themselves for the defense of their cause in that legall coursse by which His Majestie had thought fit to call them to an account and tryall.

‘The like was also signified by his Lordship to Sir Robert COTTON, who was further tolde that although it was His Majestie’s pleasure that his Studies’ [meaning, that is, his Library and Museum,] ‘shoulde, as yett, remaine shut up, yet he might enter into them and take such writtings wherof he shoulde have use, provided that he did it in the presence of a Clerke of the Counsell; [Sidenote: _Council Register_, Chas. I, vol. v, ff. 495, 496 (C. O.).] and whereas the Clerke attending hath the keyes of two of his Studies he might put a seconde lock on either of them so that neither dores might be opened, but by him and the said Clerke both together.’

A reader who now looks back on this singular transaction—and who has therefore the advantage of looking at it by the stern-lights of history,—will be likely to believe that the chief offence of the pamphlet lay (in a certain sense,) in its truth. [Sidenote: CHARACTER AND AUTHORSHIP OF THE ‘PROPOSITION TO BRIDLE PARLIAMENTS.’] It was the much too frank exposition of a policy which clung very close to CHARLES’ heart, though he could ill afford—in 1629—to have it openly avowed. The undeniable fact that this ‘_Proposition for Your Majesty’s Service_’ was indeed fitter for the latitude of Constantinople, than for that of London, sounds but awkwardly on the royal lips, when connected with an assertion (in the same breath,) of the ‘justice and mildness’ of the King’s own government. The indictment which his Parliament brought against CHARLES,—and which History has endorsed,—could hardly be packed into briefer words than those which the King himself used that day at the Council Board. His notions of kingly rule, like his father’s, were in truth much better suited for the government of Turkey than for the government of England.

Sir Robert COTTON, however, had no more to do with the authorship of the ‘_Proposition_’ than had CHARLES himself. The author was Sir Robert DUDLEY. The time of its composition was at least fifteen years before the date of the imprisonment of COTTON and his companions in disfavour. The place of its birth was Florence. It cannot even be proved that COTTON had any personal knowledge of the fact that the offensive tract had been found in his own library. He had recently read it, indeed,—in common with BEDFORD, CLARE, and Oliver SAINT-JOHN, and no doubt, like them, had read it with many surging thoughts,—but he had read it in a recent transcript, written by a clerk.

Of Robert DUDLEY’S motive in writing his ‘_Proposition_’ we have also no proof. But the presumptive and internal evidence is so strong, as to make proof almost superfluous. The tract bears witness, between the lines, that it was composed to win the favour—or at least to arrest the despoiling hand—of King JAMES. And there is hardly a suggestion in it which might not be backed by some parallel passage in the writings, or the speeches, of JAMES himself, when expatiating on kingly prerogatives in some mood of mind a little more foolish than usual, or when striving—only too successfully—to train up his successor to follow in his own path. It seems like an irony of Fate to find that (in all probability,—for here again the proof is not quite clinching,) the King’s informer, against COTTON and the other offenders, was WENTWORTH, who, not many years after 1629, was to sum up views of policy much akin to Robert DUDLEY’S in the memorable word ‘_Thorough_.’

COTTON himself believed that this apparently trivial incident cost him his life. He said not long before his death,—‘It has killed me.’ We shall probably never know whether DUDLEY’S tract had anything to do with bringing about in the mind of WENTWORTH that eventful change of political views which is known to have passed over it (about the time when the incriminated manuscript was sent so eagerly from hand to hand), and which, in a few years more, was to work his death also. But one can hardly avoid, in passing, a momentary thought on the curious possibility that a pamphlet, written at Florence, in the hope that it might save, for the writer, some wreck or remnant of a despoiled inheritance,—may have proved fatal alike to the close political friend of ELIOT, and to the close political friend of LAUD. A tract of such potency may well claim a few words about its contents. They bear in every line the stamp of mental energy, and also the stamp of moral recklessness.

[Sidenote: CAREER OF SIR R. DUDLEY, (THE TRUE AUTHOR).]

Sir Robert DUDLEY knew well enough that a rooted dislike of Parliaments was, in JAMES’S mind, combined with a besetting dread of them. He knew that, between hate and fear, a Parliament was like a nightmare, for ever crouching behind the royal pillow. It is the purpose of his tract to tell the King how to drive the nightmare away. He recommends, amongst other and minor measures, the erection of a strong fortress in all the chief towns of the Kingdom, to be manned by trained bands, and to be placed in such situations as shall command the high roads. In addition to these measures, your Majesty, he says, must set up a strict system of passports, for travellers. Nor is all this merely a new and more elaborate version of the old story of belling the cat. The writer of this counsel knows, perfectly, that already the King’s poverty is the Parliament’s power; and that to build fortresses and array soldiers needs a full purse, not an exhausted one. But he says,—as WENTWORTH said after him,—that soldiers can be set to work upon good hopes of the pay to come. A resolute King, he thinks, with resolute troops at his back, could do in England what had so often been done in Italy. He could tithe men’s estates. He could make salt and some other things of prime necessity a royal monopoly. He could set a tariff on dignities of honour. He could establish sumptuary laws, such as should make the vanity and jealousy of thriving nobodies—men with full pockets and blank pedigrees—willing contributors to the King’s Exchequer. He could buy up improvident leases of Crown lands, and resell them at a large profit.

The shortsightedness of such advice as this is now obvious enough. But advice quite as shortsighted and far less plausibly couched,—for the eyes that were to read it,—had been fruitful of result, when offered to Stuarts. Nor was the man who now offered it to CHARLES a mere clever talker. He was a man who had already acquitted himself with conspicuous ability in several spheres of action, lying widely apart.

Sir Robert DUDLEY possessed many splendid accomplishments. He had been educated by the same ripe scholar who afterwards became tutor to Prince HENRY. At the age of one and twenty, he had put himself into the lists with RALEGH, as navigator and discoverer, by heading an expedition to the Oronoco. [Sidenote: THE CAREER OF SIR ROBERT DUDLEY.] In the course of that expedition he had captured nine Spanish ships; one of them of twice his own strength. At three and twenty, he had fought, side by side with RALEGH, in the naval battle in the bay of Cadiz; had handled his ship with an ability which won the praise of his rivals; and had then fought, in the land attack, side by side with ESSEX. When his own unbridled passions and resentments gave a fatal opening for the equally unbridled cupidity of JAMES, and of JAMES’S courtiers, to despoil him of a great estate, and to drive him into exile, he showed that he knew how to snatch honour out of defeat. He laid the foundation of a new English trade with Italy and created—it is not saying too much—the maritime prosperity of Leghorn. He drained vast Italian marshes, and made corn to grow where corn had never grown before. The man who, in early life, had won fame at once as a navigator full of pluck and resource, and as an able soldier by sea and land:—and who, on attaining full manhood, had shown himself both a clever diplomatist and a great engineer;—did not go to his foreign grave before he had won literary fame with the pen, and scientific fame at the furnace of the chemist. He had, in its fullest measure, the versatility and the energy of his race. English family biography, I suppose, can scarcely show a stranger group of lives than the successive lives of the last four DUDLEYS of that line:—Edmund, the Minister of HENRY VII, and author of _The Tree of the Commonwealth_; NORTHUMBERLAND, the subduer of EDWARD VI, and the murderer of Jane GREY; LEICESTER, the Favourite of ELIZABETH; Sir Robert, the self-made exile, and the maker of Leghorn. Whilst English history, in its long course, can scarcely match the fatality which seems to have foredoomed powers of mind and strength of will, such as are rarely repeated in four successive generations, to teem with evil instead of good for England.

Such, in few words, was the career of the man, the forgotten production of whose pen was to shorten the life of a statesman whose only connection with it—so far as the evidence goes—lay in the fact that a copy chanced to turn up in his library; fell under the keen eye of a lawyer who thought that something might be made of it; and was then copied—probably by some clerk, who was in the habit of making transcripts for students to whom money was less precious than time.[14] In some points of the story there is still considerable uncertainty. But so much as this seems to be established. How the tract came, at the first, into Sir Robert COTTON’S library there is no evidence whatever to shew.

It is not the least curious point in this transaction that the Earl of SOMERSET should have been mixed up with it. He had been released from the Tower almost eight years before (namely, on the 28th of January, 1622), but was prohibited from living near the Court. At first, he was ordered to restrict himself to one or other of two old mansions in Oxfordshire—Caversham and Grey’s Court. [Sidenote: _Council Registers, James I_, vol. v, pp. 230, 425 (C. O.).] Afterwards, his option was enlarged, by including, in the license, Aldenham, in Hertfordshire. It is evident that, after BUCKINGHAM’S death, he began to hope that a political career might be still possible for him. And statesmen like BEDFORD and CLARE—as well as COTTON—kept up with him a correspondence.

More than once or twice, coming events had cast their preliminary shadows over Sir Robert, in relation to the very matter which so vexed his heart in the winter of 1629. ‘Sir Robert COTTON’S Library is threatened to be sealed up’ is a sentence which made its occasional appearance in news-letters, long before King CHARLES hurried down to the Council Chamber to vent his indignation on the handing about of DUDLEY’S ‘_Proposition to bridle Parliaments_.’

[Sidenote: BEN JONSON AND THE VERSES TO FELTON.]

One cause of the rumour lay doubtless in the known enmity between BUCKINGHAM and the great antiquary. This enmity, on one occasion, brought Ben JONSON into peril. Ben was fond of visiting Cotton House. He liked the master, and he liked the table; and he was wont to meet at it men with whom he could exchange genial talk. On one such occasion, just a year before the Florence pamphlet incident, some verses went round the table at Cotton House, with the dessert. They began, ‘_Enjoy thy bondage_,’ and ended with the words ‘_England’s ransom here doth lie_.’ Only two months had then passed since BUCKINGHAM’S assassination, and these verses were, or were supposed to be, addressed to FELTON. We can now imagine more than one reason why such lines may have been curiously glanced at, over Sir Robert’s table, without assuming that there was any triumphing over a fallen enemy; still less any approval of murder. But there seems to have been present one guest too many. [Sidenote: _Domestic Corresp. Charles I_, vol. cxix, § 33.] Some informer told the story at Whitehall, and JONSON found himself accused of being the author of the obnoxious verses. He cleared himself; but not, it seems, without some difficulty and annoyance.

The release from immediate restraint of the prisoner of November ’29 was no concession to any prompting of CHARLES’ own better nature. Fortunately for Sir Robert COTTON, his companions in the offence were peers. Their fellow-peers shewed, quietly but significantly, that continued restraint would need to be preceded by some open declaration of its cause. During the course of the proceedings which followed their release it was asserted—I do not know by whom—that not only had the ‘_Proposition_’ been copied, but that an ‘_Answer_’ to it had been either written, or drafted. And that the reply, like the original tract, would be found in Sir Robert’s library.

This somewhat inexplicable circumstance in the story is nowhere mentioned, I think, except in a Minute of the Privy Council. The Minute runs thus:—

‘A Warrant directed to Thomas MEWTAS, Esq. ... and Laurence WHITAKER, Esq. [Clerks of Council] autorising them to accompanie Sir Robert COTTON, Knight, to his house and assist him in searching amongst the papers in his studie or elsewhere, for certaine notes or draughtes for an answer to a “_Proposicion_” pretended to be made “_for His Majesties Service_” touching the securing of His Estate, and also to seeke diligently amongst his papers, and lykewise the trunkes and chambers of Mr. JAMES, and [of] FLOOD, Sir Robert COTTON’S servant, as well for anie such notes, as also for coppies of the said “_Proposicion_,” and for other wrytings, of that nature, which may import prejudice to the government and His Majestie’s service.’ [Sidenote: _Council Registers, Charles I_; vol. 5, pp. 493, 495. 1629. Nov. 10. Whitehall. (C. O.).] The new search, it seems, had not the desired, or any important, result.

A year passed away. The proceedings in the Star Chamber proved to be almost as fruitless, as had been the vain, but repeated, searches which wearied the legs and perplexed the minds of Clerks of Council and of Messengers of the Secretary’s office. [Sidenote: _Domestic Corresp. Chas. I_, clxvii, § 65, seqq. (R. H.)] But the locks and seals were still kept on the Cottonian Library. Sir Robert and his son (afterwards Sir Thomas) petitioned the King over and over again. But CHARLES had set his face as a flint, and would not listen. In vain he was told that the Manuscripts were perishing by neglect; and that, as they occupied some of the best rooms, the continued locking up made their owner to be like a prisoner, in his own house. In order to go into any one of them he had to send to Whitehall, to request the presence of a Clerk of the Council.

[Sidenote: COTTON’S DECLINE OF HEALTH.—THE ARTFUL QUACK AND THE WARY PATIENT.]

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 12_s._, 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.’ [Sidenote: 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. [Sidenote: _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—

... last, best, of the ‘_Hundred Merry Tales_’ Of how [a grave and learned sage] devised To carry off a spouse that moped too much, And cured her of the vapours in a trice;

· · · · ·

For now the husband—playing Vulcan’s part,— ... started in hot pursuit To catch the lovers, and came raging up; Cast then his net, and call’d neighbours to see The convicts in their rosy impudence.

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. [Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 1630. July—Decr.]

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] [Sidenote: _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.

[Sidenote: _Domestic Corresp._, Charles I, vol. clxvii, § 45, seqq. (R. H.).]

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. [Sidenote: 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. [Sidenote: 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. [Sidenote: 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:—

‘My Faith is frail; Hope constant never, Yet this my comfort is, for ever, God saves not man for merit.’[18]

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.’ [Sidenote: 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. [Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: THE ROYAL MESSAGE TO SIR THOMAS COTTON, 2nd BART.]

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.’ [Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: _Domestic Corresp._, Charles I, vol. cccxliii, § 67; cccxlvi, § 115; cccxlv, § 17; cccxlviii, cccl, § 40; cccliv, § 58; ccclxi, § 104; ccclxvi, § 13; ccclxxi, § 58. (R. H.)]

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.

[Sidenote: THE COMMITTEE OF SEQUESTRATIONS FOR HUNTINGDONSHIRE.]

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. [Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: The Proceedings of the Huntingdonshire Sequestrators at Conington.]

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. [Sidenote: _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). [Sidenote: _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.’ [Sidenote: _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. [Sidenote: 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_.’ [Sidenote: 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. [Sidenote: _Autobiog. and Corresp._, vol. ii, p.

40.] [Sidenote: _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. [Sidenote: 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. [Sidenote: 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. [Sidenote: 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. [Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 1731 October.]

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.’ [Sidenote: _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. [Sidenote: 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. [Sidenote: 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. [Sidenote: _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.

[Sidenote: THE PROJECT OF 1707 FOR UNITING THE COTTONIAN, ROYAL, AND ARUNDEL, LIBRARIES.]

There were many projects for making Sir Robert COTTON’S noble collections, both in literature and antiquities, the foundation of a ‘British Museum,’ before a feasible and successful project was hit upon. [Sidenote: Sloane to Charlett, 7 April, 1707. (Bodleian Library, Oxford).] It is curious to note that one of these schemes embraced, as the groundwork of the projected national Museum, the collections of Sir Robert COTTON, of Prince HENRY, and of Lord ARUNDEL; and that some

## particulars of the plan were narrated—to a country correspondent—by Sir

Hans SLOANE, almost fifty years before his own conditional bequest gave occasion and means for the eventual union of the collections so spoken of with the vast gatherings of all kinds, in literature and in science, to the procuring of which so large a portion of his own useful and laborious life was to be devoted.

When that occasion came, two of the then Cottonian Trustees framed a Petition to Parliament in which they expressed their acknowledgments for ‘seasonable and necessary care’ of the Cotton Library. They alleged that it had remained ‘almost useless’ to the Public, during many years, for want of a fixed and convenient building to receive it; that it had been exposed to many dangers by frequent removals, and had once run the hazard of ‘a total destruction by fire.’ If, said they, the loss which the Public then sustained proved to be less than had been feared, the Public owed the obligation ‘to a great member of this House’ [of Commons] ‘who powerfully interposed and assisted in its preservation.’ The allusion is to the Right Hon. Arthur ONSLOW, the then Speaker, who afterwards became one of the first Trustees of the Museum established by the Act of 1753.

[Sidenote: Petition of Samuel Burroughs and Thos. Hart; MS. in Cottonian ‘Appendix’ (B. M.).]

The Petitioners proceed to state that their most earnest wishes are accomplished by seeing a Library, famed throughout Europe, with the generous gifts of Major EDWARDS annexed thereto, placed out of all further dangers from neglect, and that they rejoice to perceive that the Museum of their own Founder is about to be enlarged by other rare and valuable collections. ‘We are,’ say they, ‘fully persuaded that an edifice raised upon such a stately plan will, by degrees, be stored with benefactions and become a common Cabinet for preserving with safety all curiosities and whatsoever is choice or excellent in its kind. Moreover, being a new institution for the service of the learned world it will be an honour to the Nation, an ornament long wanted in this great city, and a distinguished event in the history of our times.’ [Sidenote: Heretofore, p. 3.] Then follows the passage which I have prefixed, by way of motto, to this first division of the volume now in the reader’s hands.

When these Petitioners went on to state to Parliament that ‘no expression of gratitude can be too great ... for doing honour to the memory of Sir Robert COTTON,’ their assertion gave rise to no utterance of hostile feeling. [Sidenote: RECENT CHARGES AGAINST THE CHARACTER AND FAME OF SIR R. COTTON.] They were not even charged with undue laudation of their ancestor. People who at that time troubled themselves to think of such matters at all, were agreed in regarding Sir Robert COTTON as unquestionably one of the worthies of England. Nowadays—as I have had occasion to show already—there are many gainsayers. A distinguished historian (Mr. GARDINER) asperses COTTON’S character both for statesmanship and for truthfulness; whilst a distinguished archæologist (Mr. BREWER) charges him with embezzling records.

The first charge has been partly met, in these pages, by the simple apposition and collation of contemporary evidence. The reader has his choice between the cumulative testimony of several English peers and statesmen; and the unsupported testimony of one foreign diplomatist, who made it his boast to be the enemy of Englishmen, and whose hostility was graduated in tolerably exact accordance with the qualities and the deeds which have made England proud of them. The home witnesses gave their testimony whilst the events were still fresh in men’s minds. They gave it in broad daylight, and with open doors. The foreign witness put his evidence into a secret dispatch, to be seen by no human eye, out of the Spanish Cabinet, until our own historian disinterred it, at Simancas, two centuries and a half after date. Nor is this quite all.

If GONDOMAR’S account be true, not only was Sir Robert COTTON’S life as a statesman a protracted lie, but his duplicity was so superbly cloaked as to deceive the most keen-sighted of his contemporaries. The men who sat habitually at his board in his days of health, and who ministered at his bedside in all the offices of tender friendship in his days of sickness and of death, were all wrong about his character. [Sidenote: _A Discours wether yt be fitt for Inglande to make peace with Spaine._ MS. Cott. Vespas. C. xiii, ff. 160, seqq. (B. M.).] And there is this other little fact to boot: Sir Robert COTTON began his public life by as open a declaration of anti-Spanish policy in relation to the great question of the Netherlands as ever came from the lips of our RALEGH. He ended his public life with as staunch an adherence to the principles, both in Church and State, which the rulers of Spain abhorred as that which had been shown by RALEGH on the scaffold in Old Palace Yard, or by ELIOT in the dungeon of the Tower of London. Meanwhile, just in the mid-channel of his career, and in the prime of his faculties, Sir Robert COTTON threw himself, gratuitously, at the feet of GONDOMAR. He humbly asked leave to take Spanish service in the guise of a political slave. The historian’s proposition is a bold one. And its evidence needs to be cogent. English readers now know quite enough about GONDOMAR to judge whether or not his sole testimony is sufficient to damn the fame of such a man as COTTON;—to degrade him from the rank of an English worthy;—to brand him as a criminal virtually convicted of apostacy in religion, and of treason to his avowed convictions in politics?[24]

From the nature of things the second charge cannot be so directly, so compactly, or so effectively met. Almost a third of the manuscripts which form the most important section of the Cotton Library consist of, or contain, Papers of State. Of these a very considerable proportion once belonged to the State. How came they to pass into the hands of Sir Robert COTTON?

[Sidenote: MR. BREWER’S ACCOUNT OF SIR R. COTTON’S ACQUISITION OF STATE PAPERS.]

By Mr. BREWER the question has been answered, unhesitatingly and exhaustively. Large portions of the Diplomatic Correspondence of HENRY THE EIGHTH were, he says, ‘carried off in 1614, if not before, by Sir Robert COTTON.... The original bundles appear to have been broken up under the keepership of AGARDE, when the Treasury of the Exchequer was rifled of its most precious contents to augment the collections of Sir R. COTTON.... [Sidenote: _Calendar of the State Papers_; Reign of Henry VIII, Pref., pp. viii, ix.] For the early years of HENRY, his [Sir Robert’s] collections are more numerous, and even more interesting, than the documents in the English, the French, or the Spanish Archives. They are equally authentic.... By what fraud or negligence they found their way into the possession of Sir Robert COTTON it is not for me to inquire.’

No writer can be better qualified to speak with authority on such a topic as this than is Mr. BREWER. Familiar with State Papers and with records of all kinds for a very long period, he has won the deep respect of all students of our history by the uses to which his knowledge has been applied. But the ablest writer will sometimes write hastily. The most impartial inquirer will now and then reach a conclusion by overleaping part of the evidence.

The sweeping passage which I have quoted, like other passages in Mr. RILEY’S preface to _Liber Custumarum_, previously noticed, leaves altogether out of view three or four whole classes of testimony—chains not links—having a vital bearing on the issue. For example—

[Sidenote: Sir T. Wilson to King James I, _Domestic Corresp._, vol. xcvi, § 41*, seqq. (R. H.)]

I. It disregards the fact that certain bundles of State letters and papers were given by the King’s order to Sir Robert COTTON, during the reign of JAMES THE FIRST. These, indeed, were commanded to be ‘subscriptions and signatures of Princes and great men, attached to letters _otherwise unimportant_.’ But who is to tell us what was the estimate of ‘importance’ in papers of State formed, two centuries and a half ago, by JAMES, who gave the order, or by Sir Thomas WILSON, who received it?

II. It disregards the fact that long before, as well as long after, that known order of 1618, Sir Robert’s possession of papers once the property of the Government was so published and so recognized as to imply, by fair induction, that the possession must have been—as far as he was concerned—a lawful one. In his own writings, he iterates and reiterates reference to national documents then in his own collection. His references are specific and minute. Secretaries of State write to him, asking leave to inspect original Treaties (sometimes in order to lay them before the King in person) and promising to return them promptly. [Sidenote: _Domestic Corresp._, as above, 1621, March; and _passim_; also _Council Books_ (C. O.).] Law Officers of the Crown desire him kindly to afford them opportunities for collating public instruments, preserved at Cotton House, with public instruments still in the repositories of the Crown.

III. It leaves out of sight the fact that in the correspondence of Sir Edward COKE with Sir Robert COTTON there is a passage which also _implies_—though it does not expressly assert—that Sir Robert had received from King JAMES a permission to select records, of some kind or other, from the Tower of London, anterior to the qualified permission, [Sidenote: Sir E. Coke to Sir R. Cotton; MS. Cott. Julius, ciii (Undated; probably 1612). (B. M.)] above mentioned, given in 1618, to select ‘autographs’ from the Paper Office;

IV. It disregards that strong implication of a lawful possession—so far as Sir Robert COTTON, individually, is concerned—which necessarily arises out of the fact that at two several periods the Cottonian Library was under the sole control and custody of Crown officials; [Sidenote: _Registers of Privy Council_, 1616; 1629; 1630; _passim_ (C. O.)] that it remained under such control for an aggregate period of more than two years; that COTTON’S bitter enemies were then at the head of affairs; that in 1630 a Royal Commission was actually issued [Sidenote: _Signs Manual_, Charles I, vol. xii, § 15 (R. H.).] ‘to search what Records or other Papers of State in the custody of Sir Robert COTTON properly belong to His Majesty, and thereof to certify;’ and that the existing Cottonian MSS., together with those burned in 1732, were, one year after the issue of that Commission, restored by the Crown to Sir Robert COTTON’S heirs;

[Sidenote: _e. g._ MS. Harl., 7002, ff. 120, 122, &c., MS. Cott. Julius ciii, _passim_ (B. M.).]

V. It overlooks the circumstance, vital to the issue now raised, that amongst the MSS. which most indubitably were once Crown property many can still be minutely traced from possessor to possessor, prior to their reception into the Cottonian Library;

And VI. It disregards the fact, hardly less important, that a patriotic statesman conversant both with the arcana of government at large, and with the special arcana of the State Paper Office and Secretary’s offices, under King JAMES THE FIRST and King CHARLES THE FIRST, might have cogent reasons for believing that some important classes of State Papers would be likely to remain much more truly and enduringly the property of the English nation if stored up at Cotton House—even had no ‘British Museum’ ever been created—than if stored up at Whitehall.

Inferences and implications such as these are far from amounting to conclusive proof. But most readers, I think, will assent to the assertion that, cumulatively, they amount to a very strong presumption indeed that the stigma which has been impressed on Sir Robert COTTON’S memory is both precipitate and unjust. Precipitate it plainly is, for a confident verdict has virtually been pronounced—upon a grave issue,—before hearing any evidence for the accused. Unjust I, for one, cannot but think it, inasmuch as circumstances which at most are but grounds of mere suspicion of the greater offence charged, have been so huddled up with proofs of a minor and (comparatively) venial offence, that readers giving but ordinary attention to the allegations and their respective evidence are almost certain to be misled.

For, undoubtedly, Sir Robert COTTON stands convicted of dealing, more than once, with manuscripts which he had borrowed very much as though they had been manuscripts which he possessed. Mr. RILEY’S testimony is, on this point, conclusive. An independent witness, Dr. Sedgwick SAUNDERS, the able Chairman of the Library Committee of the Corporation of London, tells me that both the _returned_ MS. of _Liber Custumarum_, and also that of _Liber Legum Antiquorum_, bear as unmistakable marks of a claim to ownership on Sir Robert’s part, as those of which the return was refused.

To such proofs as these I can myself add a new instance. Archbishop LAUD had procured, from the Principal and Fellows of St. John’s, the loan to Sir Robert COTTON of a certain ancient Beda MS. of great value. Many years passed, and the MS. had not returned to St. John’s. The Fellows cast severe blame on their eminent benefactor. [Sidenote: Archbp. Laud to Sir R. Cotton, MS. Cott. Julius C., iii, f. 232.] LAUD had to petition his friend COTTON for the return of Beda, in terms almost pathetic; and he was so doubtful whether pathos would suffice that he added bribe to entreaty. If, he said, ‘anything of worth in like kind come to my hands, I will freely give it you in recompense.’

The reader has seen the abounding proofs of that generous furtherance of every kind of literary effort which COTTON gave, throughout life, with an ungrudging heart and an open hand. [Sidenote: Bolton to Camden; MS. Harl., 7002, f. 396.] Sir ROBERT’S openness made his library—to use the words of an eminent contemporary—the ‘Common treasury’ of English antiquities. The reader now sees also the drawback. It remains for him to strike a true balance; and to strike it with justice, but also with charity.