“Et patris, et patrui, famam, virtutibus, æquat.
Sui patris et patrui, nobile nomen habet.
Adserit, invicto divinum pectore verbum,
Et Musas omni dexteritate juvat.
Hinc etiam ad promptos studiorum contulit usus,
Inspicis hoc præsens quod modo Lector opus.”
Hans Holbein has been credited with the designs for two woodcuts ex libris.
With the great amount and variety of work done by Holbein it would be most natural that he should have designed some ex libris. We of to-day can only deal with what has survived. For instance, scores of precious works printed three hundred years ago have wholly passed out of knowledge.
What a charming bookplate Hans Holbein would have invented—who knows that he did not?—say, for his noble martyr friend Sir Thomas More—perhaps depicting sweet Margaret Roper reading to her father, adding at foot of the plate some quaint motto from Erasmus! Hans Holbein lived scarcely forty-six years.
Next we will mention Hans Burgkmaier, born, too, at Augsburg in 1473, and a son of Hans Holbein the elder’s father-in-law. Several ex libris have been assigned to his hand; but with no certainty. The Emperor Maximilian I. was his patron, and Albrecht Dürer his friend.
Now we reach about the time of what, until lately, was accounted the earliest French bookplate with a date. This bears the brief but comprehensive inscription: “Ex bibliotheca Caroli Albosii. E. Eduensis. Ex labore quies.” The earliest known dated English ex libris is also of 1574; but we always, in courtesy, put our friends before ourselves, and remember Napier’s splendid remark on hearing that Lord Mahon had contemptuously spoken of Napier’s History as the best “French” history of the war: “I always thought that to be generous to a noble foe was truly English, until my Lord Mahon informed me it was wholly French.”
Sir Nicholas Bacon’s bookplate bears his arms with helmet surmounted by crest; the crest being, of course, the only crest that could belong to Bacon. The Germans very properly never dreamt that a crest ought to appear anywhere but on a helmet. We have not been so correct. This recalls the blank amazement of a German on beholding a British officer in plain clothes. I remember thirty years ago, in Germany, my friend FitzRoy Gardner happening to show a photograph of Field-Marshal Sir John Burgoyne in plain clothes. The exclamation came at once, “He cannot be an officer, he is not in uniform.” This was, of course, the chivalrous old warrior who, in his yacht, brought the lovely Empress of the French safely to our shores.
This very interesting and early English bookplate has at the foot Sir Nicholas Bacon’s motto: “Mediocria Firma,” and we need not go here in full into the point of its date, which is fairly established. It is with an inscription in books given in 1574 by Sir Nicholas Bacon to Cambridge University. Sir Nicholas, perhaps best known for being the father of Francis, was the close friend of Cecil, Lord Burleigh, and Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, fellow-ministers with him of Queen Elizabeth. Queen Bess often made herself his guest, and after her visit of six days in 1577, her host had the door by which she had passed under his roof nailed up, so that no one, after her, might cross the same threshold. Oh for the picturesque days of old! Lord Beaconsfield alone, in our day, might have thought of such a graceful act.
The second dated engraved English bookplate known at present is that of Sir Thomas Tresham, knighted by Queen Bess in 1575. The plate is armorial, with a huge array of quarterings; helmet surmounted by crest in proper style. Inscription: “Fecit mihi magna qui potens est. 1585. Jun. 29.”, and below the arms: “S Tho: Tresame Knight.”
Sir Thomas married Muriel, daughter of Sir Robert Throckmorton, and their son was Francis, “a wylde and unstayed man,” who first engaged in, and then revealed, the Gunpowder Plot. The father’s dying, in 1605, was probably the cause of the son’s not going forward in the plot, as he inherited property which would steady his aspirations. Sir Thomas left interesting memories of himself in fine buildings; and particularly in his own county of Northampton, the market-house at Rothwell, and the triangular lodge at Rushton.