And secondly, ‘Arthur Edwards, late of Saint George’s, Hanover Square, in the county of Middlesex, Esquire, being desirous to preserve for the public use the said Cottonian Library, and to prevent the like accident for the future, bequeathed the sum of seven thousand pounds’—after the occurrence of a certain contingent event—for the purpose either of erecting, ‘in a proper situation, such a house as might be most likely to preserve that Library from all accidents, or—in the event of the performance by the Public, before the falling out of the contingency above mentioned, of that duty to which it already stood pledged by Act of Parliament, then—for the purpose of purchasing such manuscripts, books of antiquities, ancient coins, medals, and other curiosities, as might be worthy to increase the Cottonian Library aforesaid;’ to which end the same public benefactor further bequeathed his own library.
In order therefore to give due effect, at length, both to the primary donation of Sir John Cotton, and to the additional benefaction made thereto by Major Arthur Edwards, Parliament now enacted that a general repository should be provided for the several collections of Cotton, Edwards, and Sloane, and that Major Edwards’ legacy of money should be paid to the Trustees created by the new Act, in accordance with the provisions heretofore recited in Sir Hans Sloane’s codicil of 1749.
The Services of Mr. Speaker Onslow in the formation of the British Museum.
It is to the exertions, at this time, of Arthur Onslow, the then Speaker of the House of Commons, that historical students owe their debt of gratitude for the preservation of the Harleian Manuscripts from that dispersion,—abroad as well as at home,—which befel the Harleian printed books.
When the Memorial of Sloane’s Trustees was first presented to George the Second, he received it with the stolid indifference to all matters bearing upon science and mental culture, which was as saliently characteristic of that king as were his grosser vices. ‘I don’t think there are twenty thousand pounds in the Treasury,’ was the remark with which he dismissed the proposal. Money could be found, indeed, for very foolish purposes, and for very base ones. And the bareness of the Treasury was, very often, the natural result of the profligacy of the Court. But, in 1753, it was a fact.
Save for Speaker Onslow’s exertions, the Memorial would have fared little better in Parliament than at Court. The then Premier, Henry Pelham, was not unfriendly to the scheme, nor was he, like his royal master, a man of sordid nature; but a Minister who was every now and then obliged to write to his ambassadors abroad, even in the crisis of important negotiations, ‘I have ordered you a part of your last year’s appointments, but we are so poor that I can do no more,’ could hardly be eager to provide forty or fifty thousand pounds for the purchase of a new Museum and the safety of an old Library.
1753. Commons’ Journals, March 19, seqq.
Onslow proposed—eventually—as a means of overcoming these difficulties, that a sum of money should be raised by a public lottery, and that it should be large enough to effect not only the immediate objects contemplated by the Will of Sir Hans Sloane, and by the prior public establishment of Sir Robert Cotton’s Library, but to purchase for a like purpose the noble series of Manuscripts which had passed (just eleven years before Sloane’s death) to the executors of the last Earl of Oxford, in trust for his widow, the Dowager Countess, and for his daughter, the Duchess of Portland.
Edward, Earl of Oxford, had stood at one period of his life, in the rank of the wealthiest of Englishmen. He was the owner of estates worth some four or five hundred thousand pounds. He was, too, a man of highly intellectual and studious tastes; but, in his case, a magnificent style of living, great generosity, and excessive trust in dependants, did what is more usually the work of huge folly or of gross sins; they brought him into circumstances which, for his position in life, might almost be called those of poverty. But for this comparative impoverishment, his own act—it is more than probable—would have secured to posterity the enjoyment, in its entirety, of the splendid library he had inherited and increased.
To the proposal of a lottery there was much solid objection. What were then called ‘parliamentary lotteries’ had been introduced expressly to put down those private lotteries, common in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which had been fraught with mischief. It was hoped, or pretended, that a ‘regulated’ evil would be reduced within tolerable limits, whilst bringing grist to the national mill. But the forty years that had passed since the first parliamentary lottery of 1709 had shown that the system was essentially and incurably mischievous. Pelham was averse to its continuance. As First Lord of the Treasury, it was his poverty, not his will, that consented to the adoption of so questionable an expedient for the purchase of the Sloane Collections. He had not, individually, any such love of learning as might have induced an appeal to Parliament to set, for once, an example of liberal and far-sighted legislation. He merely stipulated that some stringent provisos should be put into the Act, directed against the nefarious practices of the lottery-jobbers.