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The Library of Sir Robert Cotton
From: The British Library
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Nicolas Barker |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
In early seventeenth-century England the antiquarian Sir Robert Cotton assembled a library of illuminated manuscripts and documents that included the Lindisfarne Gospels, the unique text of Beowulf, and two of the four surviving original texts of Magna Carta. Despite a fire in 1731 that destroyed or damaged a quarter of the books, his collection, which was given to the nation in 1700, is one of the great riches of the holdings of The British Library. Nicolas Barker, editor of Treasures of The British Library, introduces Cotton, his books and the politically charged context of collecting at the Elizabethan and Jacobean courts. |
 n 13 February 1606 the Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries was due to meet but did not "by reson of the trobles stirred by the erle of Essex".  Why should a group of scholarly men discussing antiquities find it prudent not to meet on this occasion? They were for the most part country gentlemen, keepers of records, and (in particular) heralds, as innocent a group as might be imagined. But five days earlier, as the Earl of Essex rode up Ludgate Hill, he was followed by a herald proclaiming him traitor, "the dread word that broke the courage of many of his supporters". |
Heralds and antiquaries were not impotent bystanders in the bustle of Elizabethan England. Their interest in the continuity of past and present, the links that bound generation to generation, was not, as we would say, "academic". These links were proofs of title, to land, power or (even) the crown. If we have reason to be glad that the College of Arms pursued its business of preserving the past, by visitations, recording documents and noting monuments, through the tumults in English society from the Wars of the Roses to the Protestant succession, we must remember that it was not an altruistic concern for posterity but a lively interest in the present that impelled them to do so. |
 None knew this better than Sir Robert Cotton, "Robert Cotton Bruceus" as he habitually signed himself after 1603, emphasising his famous Scotch forebears in the reign of a Stuart king. A recent biographer points out the power that his historic collections gave him: they established the precedents that all parties, in government or business, needed to support their case. Thus Cotton's patron, Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, wrote to him about debasing coin, "though I have in my own experience observed many weighty reasones in the pointe yet I valewe muche the strength that experience of former times addes to speculation". |
Cotton as collector and politician
"The experience of former times" lay at the root of the foundation of the Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries in 1586, under the aegis of William Camden (1551-1623), the most distinguished historian and herald of his time. Earlier he had been second master of Westminster School when Cotton was a boy there, and together in 1599 they made a journey to the North of England in search of antiquities. It also underlay Cotton's final decision to base the library, till then divided between his Huntingdonshire home and London, in new quarters between the House of Lords and the House of Commons. Between these two events Cotton grew from youth to age. The early and enthusiastic antiquary became the trusted adviser of the Earl of Northampton, the Lord Privy Seal, and later of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, for whom Cotton investigated the prerogatives of the office of Constable, not for antiquarian reasons, but as the basis of his struggle with the Duke of Buckingham. The loss of that battle--not through any weakness in his precedents--proved fatal for Cotton. |
But Cotton was no relentless player in the Court of Jacobean power politics. It is impossible to mistake the genuine love of antiquity for its own sake that informs his correspondence and is evident in his collection.  The legend that John Dee buried the manuscripts of his work, "and Sir Robert Cotton bought the field to digge after it", may be apocryphal, but it reveals a passion for preservation, rather than power. This is, perhaps, best shown in the petition, drawn up and signed by Cotton with two older friends and fellow-antiquaries, John Dodderidge (later Sir John; 1555-1628) and James Ley (later 1st Earl of Marlborough; 1552-1629), possibly in 1602. This is the best expression of Cotton's motives in forming his collection, and is the first fully articulated scheme for a British national library. It is headed (clearly after the document itself was written) "A proiect touching a petition to be exhibited vnto her maiesty for the erecting of her library and an Academy". |
Nothing came of this proposal. Perhaps it was never submitted. It is possible to guess why, for the Society of Antiquaries itself came to an end shortly afterwards, for reasons recorded later by Sir Henry Spelman: "we had notice that his majesty took a little mislike of our society; not being informed that we had resolv'd to decline all matters of state". If they had declined, the option not to do so clearly existed and constituted a threat, in James I's view. Cotton's library and its formation were his response, at once daring and diplomatic, to the rejection of the "project". |
The Cotton Genesis and other manuscripts
Cotton's name is remembered today as the owner of the Cotton Genesis, a set of illustrations of the first book of the Bible dating from the fifth to the sixth century, once among the greatest of the very few surviving examples of classical book-painting, now reduced to a few sad charred fragments by the 1731 fire. The book had reached Cotton from Sir John Fortescue to whom it had been given by Queen Elizabeth. She had it from her father Henry VIII, to whom it had been presented by two Greek bishops, for the same ecumenical reasons as prompted the gift of the Codex Alexandrinus a century later. |
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We also owe to Cotton another manuscript, of even greater importance to Britain, Cotton MS. Nero D.IV, better known as the Lindisfarne Gospels, which he got from his friend Robert Bowyer, Clerk of the House of Commons. He also had the eighth-century Anglo-Saxon Psalter (later known as the Vespasian Psalter), once at St Augustine's, Canterbury, which he believed to be one of the manuscripts sent to St Augustine by Pope Gregory I; the Coronation Gospels, the Aethelstan Psalter, the Anglo-Saxon Pentateuch, King Alfred's translation of Orosius's Historia Universalis, five of the seven surviving manuscripts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the collection that contains the remarkably detailed Anglo-Saxon "World Map" of c.1000. |
Other major Anglo-Saxon sources include a collection of laws made for Archbishop Wulfstan of York, and the Durham Liber vitae, in use from the ninth to the sixteenth century. He had two of the oldest manuscripts of Bede's Historia ecclesiastica, both eighth/ninth-century, a fine Old English Herbal, Aelfric's Homilies, and the most important of all Anglo-Saxon literary manuscripts, the unique text of Beowulf. |
 Amongst later chronicles and literature, his collection was scarcely less rich. There were, first and foremost, two of the four surviving original texts of Magna Carta. He had examples of many of the major chronicles, including a twelth-century manuscript of Nennius, Knighton's chronicle, the twelth-century Simeon of Durham, and Thomas of Elmham's biography of Henry V. There were, as well, many monastic cartularies (Cotton too benefited from the dissolution of the religious houses), and the lives of the Welsh Saints, with the Welsh legal code of Hywel Dda. The Middle English texts included several of the Ancrene Riwle, Layamon's Brut, the Coventry Mystery Plays, and, as important for Middle English as Beowulf for Old English, the unique manuscript of Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. |
 Among illuminated manuscripts and documents, beside the Lindisfarne Gospels and Aethelstan's books, he had the foundation charter of New Minster in 966, and the Prayer Book of Aelfwine and the copy of Prudentius's Psychomachia, both masterpieces of Anglo-Saxon drawing. Among later manuscripts were the Psalter of Henry of Blois, Bishop of Winchester, pictures of the Kings of England, c.1300, the French King Charles V's Coronation Book, the illuminated Admiralty Ordinances of 1413, Henry VI's Psalter, and, one of the great masterpieces of late medieval drawing, the "Beauchamp Pageants", a series of pictures illustrating the life and achievements of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick (1388-1439), made c.1484-90, possibly for his daughter Anne, widow of the "Kingmaker". |
Early royal documents
Besides all these treasures of medieval art, history and literature, the Library was especially rich in original documents of the history of Cotton's own time, including forty-three volumes for the reigns of Henry VIII and Elizabeth relating to domestic matters and negotiations with France, many of the latter annotated by Lord Burghley, and fifty more relating to other overseas affairs. He has been blamed, in his own time and since, for appropriating material that belonged to official repositories. He was certainly unscrupulous; but he had learned to put little trust in official keepers of records and, besides, as we have seen, he saw a higher purpose for his own collection which others, notably James I, endorsed. Without him, the unique series of early royal documents, letters of Thomas More, Anne Boleyn and others to Henry VIII, Edward VI's diary, Charles V's letter to Queen Mary announcing his abdication, the documents of the end of Mary Queen of Scots and Sir Walter Ralegh's journal might have ceased to exist. |
Nor were Cotton's interests restricted to Britain. He had the eighth-century St Jerome, written in France soon after 743, manuscripts from Switzerland, Holland and Italy, and a Russian Chronicle. He even possessed, most unusual at this time, some oriental material: Archbishop James Ussher gave Cotton his 'ancient copy of the Samaritan Pentateuch' in 1628; there was even a Chinese manuscript in the library. His interest in geography accounts for the manuscript of John de Castro's account of Portuguese voyages to India written in 1542, which may have belonged to Ralegh. He had friends abroad, too--Janus Gruter, Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc, to whom he sent the fifteenth-century manuscript of French laws, the historian Jacques Auguste De Thou, the Dutch scholar Johannes de Laet and others. |
Cotton was a man of many friends: his collection was used, and borrowed from, extensively. He lent books to Ralegh, writing his Historie of the World in the Tower, and to Bacon for his Henry VII; Ben Jonson borrowed Aelfric's Homilies. He welcomed their company, and they sent him contributions for his library. This explains the wealth of letters and papers relating to antiquities, the presence too of important heraldic documents, the Camden Roll of c.1280 and the Caerlaverock Poem of 1300. It is pleasant for us, as it was for his contemporaries, to imagine him entertaining friends in the library room, among the presses, each one capped with the bust of a Roman emperor or empress, who gave their names to the shelves beneath, containing the all but one thousand manuscripts. Printed books (few of which now remain) presumably filled the space between. If we could leave him there, all would be well. But disaster befell him. |
The fate of Sir Robert Cotton
On 2 February 1626, his coronation day, Charles I went by river from Whitehall Palace to Westminster. Sir Robert Cotton stood waiting at the river steps of his garden, "readie...to receave him with a booke of Athelstone's, being the fouer Evangelists in Lattine...upon which for diuers hundred yeares together, the Kings of England had solemnlie taken their coronation oath". But--the words are those of Cotton's younger friend and rival collector, Sir Simonds D'Ewes -- "the royall barge bawked those steps soe fitlie accommodated" (a carpet had been laid) and landed at the much less convenient Parliament stairs. It was a calculated snub. Cotton was too active a parliamentarian, too close to Arundel, for the rising star, the Duke of Buckingham, and this was the result. |
Worse was to follow. In 1629 he was confined, on the dubious charge of providing the copy for a seditious pamphlet ("I told you it was a MS therefore Sir Robert Cotton must have his share", the informer said with understandable if dubious logic), and his beloved library was sealed off and denied to him. His petition for its return was still unanswered when he died, it was said of grief, on 6 May 1631. The library remained closed. During the Civil War. the learned antiquaries, John Selden (who kept the key to it) and Sir William Dugdale, frequented the library and sorted and bound papers. It was returned to the family in 1650, moved to the country and brought back to London at the Restoration. No longer dangerous, it had now become an embarrassment (though small accessions were made). In 1700 Cotton's grandson established the trust that made the library over to the nation. |
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