Fig. 1.—Indentures between Henry VII, and John Islippe,
Abbot of Westminster, concerning the foundation
of the Chantrey, etc., MS.
On one book, probably once the property of Henry VII., which somehow became separated from the rest, is found his coat-of-arms impressed on the gilt edges—a curious and early instance of decorative edge-work. A drawing of it was published in Bibliographica, vol. ii. p. 395. It is a Sarum Missal, Rouen, 1497, and was given to Cardinal Pole probably by Queen Mary, and eventually purchased by the British Museum.
Henry VIII. apparently thought much of his library and its proper preservation and extension. He appointed John Leland, the antiquary, to be his library keeper, and gave him a special commission under the Broad Seal to travel and collect all kinds of antiquities and make records of them. Leland acquired, under these powers, many valuable manuscripts from the monasteries, then so ruthlessly being despoiled of their treasures; but, unfortunately, he does not seem to have been able to preserve any of the precious bindings in which many of them were doubtless encased.
There is a considerable amount of documentary evidence concerning the binding of Henry VIII.’s books. Notices occur in the records of the “Privy Purse Expenses” of payments for velvet and vellum; and these two materials are again largely mentioned in the most interesting account now preserved among the additional manuscripts at the British Museum of the royal printer and binder, “Thomas Berthelett.” This account, which is very full, refers to work done during the years 1541-43; and although, so far, no actual book has been identified as being one of those mentioned, yet the bindings we still possess of Henry VIII.’s are so generally of the same kind as those described that there seems little doubt that most, if not all of them, were bound by Berthelet.
He mentions a Psalter “covered with crimosyn satyne,” and we possess a collection of tracts bound in this manner, with a delicate tracery of gold cord, and on the edges is written in gold the words “Rex in Æternum Vive Neez.” This is probably what Berthelet, in an entry a little further on, calls “drawyng in gold on the transfile.” There are several mentions of books “gorgiously gilded on the leather,” and also others where he says books are bound “backe to backe” none of which seem to have survived, but there are plenty of instances of the “white leather gilt,” so often used. “Purple velvet” was used to cover “ij Primers,” which are now lost; but we possess a splendid volume covered in this way with embroidery upon it, and again he says he has bound books after the “Venecian fascion” and “Italian fascion.” Truly the Italian work of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries is extremely fine, and Berthelet may have seen some specimens of it, and, admiring them, have endeavoured to imitate their peculiar and beautiful gilded tooling.
To Berthelet must be conceded the honour of being the first English binder to use gold stamped work on leather, and he does so with admirable effect. Many of his bindings gilded on white leather, sometimes deer-skin, sometimes vellum, are most charming; indeed, the taste for vellum has never died out in England from Berthelet’s time to the present day, when we have William Morris’s dainty volumes with their green ties. Berthelet’s books also generally had ties, but they are now all worn off.
A fine instance of this white leather and gold occurs on Sir Thomas Elyot’s Image of Governance, printed by Berthelet in 1541.
It bears the same design on each side. A panel, enclosed by an ornamental fillet, contains a very graceful arrangement of curves forming a central space in which are the words “Dieu et mon Droit”; and at each side of this the royal initials contained in two semicircles left for them. At each of the inner corners is a large set stamp, and the ground is dotted over with small circles and the daisy—a badge used by the Tudors probably as a compliment to their ancestress Margaret de Beaufort. On the edges are painted in gold the words “Rex in Æternum Vive.”