THE ASHBURNHAM COLLECTIONS.
In 1763, Mr Grenville, then First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer, had occasion to enlist the services of a gentleman familiar with ancient handwriting, in the arrangement of papers and other business. So well did Mr Thomas Astle do his work, that, two years later, he was made Receiver-general on the Civil List; subsequently becoming, in succession, chief clerk in the Record Office, and keeper of the records in the Tower. Astle was a diligent and discreet collector of manuscripts; and mindful of his obligations to the Grenvilles, directed by his will that his valuable library should pass into the possession of the Marquis of Buckingham for the sum of five hundred pounds. That nobleman gladly accepted the conditional bequest, and housed the sometime keeper’s treasures honourably at Stowe. As opportunities offered, he and his successor added books and documents to Astle’s store, until they had brought together a mass of original materials for the history of the three kingdoms unrivalled by any other private collection.
The middle of the present century saw Stowe shorn of its glories; and in 1849, its famous manuscripts were advertised for public sale; but their threatened dispersion was fortunately averted by the Earl of Ashburnham purchasing the entire collection, and adding it to his own extensive library, rich in works of early European and English literature. At the time of the earl’s death he was the possessor of four distinct collections, known as the Stowe, the Barrois, the Libri, and the Appendix. The last-named, representing his occasional purchases, consisted of two hundred and fifty volumes, including richly illuminated missals and Books of Hours, choice copies of the works of Chaucer, Wickliffe, Gower, Dante; English chronicles, monastic registers, and individual manuscripts of great rarity and value. The Barrois collection of seven hundred and two manuscripts was notable for its specimens of ancient bindings, its illuminated manuscripts, and its examples of early French literature; while the Libri section was remarkable for its very ancient manuscripts, its copies of Dante’s Commedia, its works of early Italian literature, its rare autographs, and its letters of distinguished French men of science.
In 1879, all these treasures were offered by the present Earl of Ashburnham to the trustees of the British Museum for the sum of one hundred and sixty thousand pounds; but upon their requesting him to separate the manuscripts from the printed books, the earl intimated that, finding he had underpriced his library in the first instance, he should require the hundred and sixty thousand pounds for the manuscripts alone; or fifty thousand for the Stowe collection, and fifty thousand for the Appendix collection, if the trustees elected to buy them only; and with that intimation the negotiation ended. In the autumn of 1882 the Museum authorities sought Lord Ashburnham again, to learn that he would only sell the collection as a whole at the price he had originally named. The keeper of the department of Manuscripts went down to Ashburnham Place, examined the collection volume by volume, and returned with above nine hundred of the choicest volumes and portfolios of papers, for the inspection of the trustees themselves; and they came to the conclusion that, all things considered, the collection was worth the money demanded for it; and recommended the Treasury to purchase it, and give the trustees power to make over certain portions of the Libri and Barrois collections—said to have been abstracted from the public libraries of France—to the French government on payment of twenty-four thousand pounds. To this proposition the Treasury would not agree, not being prepared to purchase the collection en bloc.
Then Lord Ashburnham agreed to sell the Museum the Stowe and Appendix divisions for ninety thousand pounds. The Treasury offered seventy thousand pounds; whereupon the earl requested that the manuscripts in the possession of the Museum trustees should be returned to their proper home. Determined, if possible, to avert what they regarded as an irreparable national calamity, the trustees proposed to make good the twenty thousand pounds by allowing a reduction on the annual vote for the Museum to the amount of four thousand pounds for the next five years. ‘My Lords’ were obdurate, the earl was firm; and the disappointed Museum trustees had nothing left to them but to retire with an expression of their regret at the untoward result of their efforts to save the precious manuscripts from probable expatriation. A week or two later, however, they were gladdened by receiving a verbal intimation from the guardian of the public purse that the government were ready to purchase the Stowe collection provided it could be obtained for forty thousand pounds. Lord Ashburnham would not lower his demand to that extent, but consented to accept forty-five thousand pounds. So the bargain was struck, the House of Commons voted the money, and the much-talked-of manuscripts became the property of the nation.
Whatever the pecuniary value of the Stowe collection may be, the custodians of our great library may well rejoice upon acquiring its nine hundred and ninety-six volumes of charters and cartularies; ancient missals and rituals; old English chronicles; old statutes; reports of famous trials; household books; royal wardrobe accounts; papal bulls and indulgences; historical, legal, and ecclesiastical documents; diplomatic, political, and private correspondence; and papers of more or less value to the antiquary, genealogist, and general student. In truth, the subject-matter of this mass of manuscripts is of so varied a nature that it would almost be easier to say what is not, than what is to be found therein. We shall not attempt to do either, but content ourselves with enumerating some of the curiosities of the collection.
First among these comes a volume of Anglo-Saxon charters, the cover of which is adorned with figures of saints and martyrs, and a representation of the crucifixion, worked with the needle, in coloured silks and gold-thread. The first charter in the volume is one of six lines, by which Withred, king of Kent, granted certain lands to the nuns of Liming; His Majesty, ‘being illiterate,’ making the sign of the cross against his name. Another relic of Anglo-Saxon times is the register of Hyde Abbey, Winchester, the greater part of which is supposed to have been written in the reign of Canute. On the first page are portraits of that monarch and his queen ‘Ailgythu’ in their robes of state. On the fourth leaf are memoranda of the Conqueror’s building a palace at Winchester, and of the burning of the city in 1140 by Robert, Earl of Gloucester. A copy of Alfred’s will is followed by an account of the burying-places of the Anglo-Saxon kings and saints, various forms of benedictions, a list of relics preserved at Hyde, and a calendar of saints. On one page is a fragment of the exultat as chanted on Holy Saturday in the monastery, with the musical notes—consisting of lines and points placed over the syllables, and indicating by their forms the high and low tones in which these syllables were to be sung.
Of historical interest are—the original report of the trial of ‘Johanne d’Arc,’ dated the 7th of July 1456, and duly signed and attested by the notaries; the original declaration of eight of the bishops in favour of Henry VIII.’s assumption of power in church matters, in which they pronounce that Christian princes may make ecclesiastical laws; and two little volumes—one about three inches square, containing sundry calendars and tables, written on leaves of vellum, and bearing on the fly-leaf, in the handwriting of the Duke of Somerset: ‘Fere of the lord is the begenning of wisdume: put thi trust in the lord wh all thine heart; be not wise in thyne own conseyte but fere the lord and fle from evele frome the toware the day before deth, 1551. E. Somerset.’ The other booklet is about an inch square, and bound in gold, enamelled in black, and furnished with two small gold rings, by which it could be suspended to its owner’s waist. It consists of a hundred and ninety-six pages of vellum, on which are written the seven penitential psalms. This was one of Henry VIII.’s gifts to Anne Boleyn, and was given by her—Horace Walpole says—to her maid of honour Mrs Wyatt, when the beautiful queen bade farewell to the world on Tower Hill.
Among other originals of political importance may be noted the return concerning the levy of ship-money, made to Sir Peter Temple, High-sheriff of Bucks, from the parish of Great Kimble, bearing the names of those who tendered their refusal to the constables and assessors; the said constables’ and assessors’ names appearing in the list of protesters, at the head of which stands the name of John Hampden. Of a little later date is the secret article of the treaty made in 1654 between Louis XIV. and the Protector of England for the expulsion from France of Charles II., the Duke of York, and eighteen royalists; Cromwell undertaking in return to expel certain Frenchmen from England. This document is signed by De Bordeaux on the part of the French king; by Fiennes, Lisle, and Strickland on the part of the Commonwealth. The Grand Monarch’s own signature appears to an order addressed to the governor of the Bastile—an order for him to permit the Countess de Bussy to sleep with her husband.
There are two literary curiosities in the shape of a five-act tragedy by Bale, Bishop of Ossory, who died in 1563; and a comedy, author unknown, intended to be played for the amusement of Elizabeth and her court; the latter ending with the following lines, addressed to Queen Bess:
May you have all the joys of innocence,
Injoyinge too all the delights of sense.
May you live long, and knowe till ye are told,
T’ endeare your beauty, and wonder you are old;
And when heaven’s heate shall draw you to the skye,
May you transfigured, not transfigured dye!
In the original draft of a dedication to be prefixed to some operas by Purcell, Dryden says: ‘Musick and poetry have ever been acknowledged sisters, which walking hand-in-hand support each other. As poetry is the harmony of words, so musick is that of notes; and as poetry is a rise above prose and oratory, so is musick the exaltation of poetry. Both of them may excel apart; but sure they are most excellent when they are joined, because nothing is then wanting to either of their perfections, for thus they appear like wit and beauty in the same person.’ At the end of a copy of Bacon’s Essays, presented to Mrs Newsham, in 1725, by ‘her servant, A. Pope,’ is a sonnet in the poet’s handwriting, entitled A Wish to Mrs M. B. on her Birthday, June 15. It is to be found in his works, expanded into a twenty-line Epistle to Miss Martha Blount, on her Birthday.
‘The Emperor of Morocco’s curses against his two eldest sons, taken from the original in his own writing in the register of the principal church at Morocco,’ is a curiosity, if scarcely a literary one; and the same may be said of a specimen of French penmanship—a series of portraits of the time of Louis XIV., executed with such freedom that they seem to have been done with one uninterrupted flourish of the pen. Each portrait has a song with music appended to it, the volume ending with a piece of music in Rousseau’s own hand, composed by him at Paris in 1776.
The letters, original and transcribed, in the collection are so multitudinous, that it is impossible to enter into detail about them; they cover every reign from Edward III. to George III., and unrepresented Englishmen of any note are few indeed; while epistles written by such illustrious foreigners as Doge Andrea Contarini, Francis I., Cardinal Mazarin, Louis XIV., Madame de Maintenon, Voltaire, Frederick the Great, Mirabeau, Lafayette, and Napoleon the Great, figure in the catalogue of contents.
We must mention that among the treasures acquired by the nation are a number of manuscripts in the Irish language, and of manuscripts relating to the history and antiquities of Ireland; besides the correspondence of Arthur Capel, Earl of Essex, Lord-lieutenant of Ireland under Charles II. The government having decided that manuscripts in the Irish language, and those bearing more or less directly upon Irish history and literature, should be lent indefinitely to the Royal Irish Academy, for the use of students and the public, the greater portion of the above will be lost to Bloomsbury—how large a portion will not be known, until the representatives of the British Museum and the Irish Academy have settled the matter between them.