‘that good Earl, once President
Of England’s Council and her Treasury;
Who liv’d in both unstain’d with gold or fee,’
at a time when such praise could seldom be given truthfully. It was as a contributor towards the common labours of that Society that Cotton made his earliest appearance as an author. The subjects chosen for his discourses at the periodical meetings of the Elizabethan antiquarians indicate the prevalent bias of his mind. Nearly all of them may be said to belong to our political archæology.
Growth of the Cottonian Library and Gallery.
Before the close of the sixteenth century, his collections of Manuscripts and of Antiquities had already become so large and important as to win for him a wide reputation in foreign countries, as well as at home. His correspondence indicates, even at that early period, a generous recognition of the brotherhood of literature, the world over, and proves the ready courtesy with which he had learned to bear somewhat more than his fair share of the obligations thence arising. In later days he was wont to say to his intimates: ‘I, myself, have the smallest share in myself.’ From youth, onwards, there is abundant evidence that the saying expressed, unboastingly, the simple facts of his daily life.
Friendship with Camden.
Camden was amongst the earliest of those intimates, and to the dying day of the author of the Britannia the close friendship which united him with Cotton was both unbroken and undiminished. The former was still in the full vigour of life when Cotton had given proof of his worthiness to be a fellow-labourer in the field of English antiquities. In 1599 they went, in company, over the northern counties; explored together many an old abbey and many a famous battle-field. When that tour was made, the evidences of the ruthless barbarism with which the mandates of Henry the Eighth had been carried out by his agents lay still thick upon the ground, and may well have had their influence in modifying some of the religious views and feelings of such tourists. Not a few chapters of the Britannia embody the researches of Cotton as well as those of Camden; and the elder author was ever ready to acknowledge his deep sense of obligation to his younger colleague. For both of them, at this time, and in subsequent years, the storied past was more full of interest than the politics, howsoever momentous or exciting, of the day. But, occasionally, they corresponded on questions of policy as well as of history. There is evidence that on one stirring subject, about which men’s views were much wont to run to extremes, they agreed in advocating moderate courses. In the closing years of the Queen, Cotton, as well as Camden, recognised the necessity that the Government should hold a firm hand over the emissaries of the Church and Court of Rome, whilst refusing to admit that a due repression of hostile intrigues was inconsistent with the honourable treatment of conscientious and peaceful Romanists.
It was, in all probability, almost immediately after Cotton’s return from the Archæological tour to the North which he had made with his early friend, that he received a message from the Queen. Elizabeth had been told of his growing fame for possessing an acquaintance with the mustiest of records, and an ability ‘to vouch precedents’ such as few students, even of much riper years, had attained to. He was now to be acquainted with a dispute about national precedency which had arisen at Calais between Sir Henry Neville and the Ambassador of Spain. |The Tractate on English precedency over Spain.| It was Her Majesty’s wish that he should search the records which bore upon the question, and send her such a report as might strengthen Neville’s hands in his contest for the honour of England.
Such a task could not fail to be a welcome one; and Cotton found no lack of pertinent evidence. The bent and habit of his mind were always methodical. He begins his abstract of the records by tabulating his argument. Precedency, he says, must have respect either to the nation or to the ruler of the nation. A kingdom must rank either (1) according to its antiquity, or (2) according to ‘the eminency of the throne royal,’ by which phrase he means the complete unity of the dominion under one supreme ruler. On the first title to precedency he observes that it may be based either upon the date of national independence, or upon that of the national recognition of Christianity. He claims for England that it was a monarchy at least four hundred and sixty years before Castile became one; that Christianity had then been established in it, without break or interruption, for a thousand years; |Cottoni Posthuma, pp. 76, 77.| whereas in Spain Christianity was ‘defaced with Moorish Mahumetisme,’ until the expulsion of the Moors by Ferdinand, little more than a century before the time at which he was writing.