If I am
Traduced by o’er hasty tongues—which neither know
My faculties nor person, yet will be
The chroniclers of my doing—let me say
’Tis but the fate of place, and the rough brake
That virtue must go through.
Were it not, however, for one pregnant circumstance in Sir Robert Cotton’s subsequent life, all this would have but a very meager attractiveness for nineteenth-century readers. The story of the growth of a great library has its charm, but the sphere of potency is of small dimension. Few but those who are themselves imbued with a spice of literary antiquarianism ever enter within the narrow circle. Just in like manner, that active literary and political correspondence—spreading from Exeter to Durham, and from Venice to Copenhagen—would nowadays have but a slender interest for anybody (not belonging to the scorned fraternity of Oldbuck and Dryasdust), were it not for that great war between King and Parliament, Cavalier and Roundhead, of which, in one sense, Cotton lived only long enough to see the gathering of forces, and the early skirmishes, but in which, nevertheless, he played a part second only to that played by Eliot and by Pym. His close connection with the Parliamentarian leaders of 1625–1629 lifts the whole story of the man out of the petty circuit of mere ‘curiosities of literature,’ into the broad arena of the hard-won liberties of England.
Cotton’s alliance with the Parliamentarian chiefs.
All students of the deeds done in that arena now know—and their knowledge is in no slight degree due to the persistent labours of a living writer—that the battle of the ‘Petition of Right’ was even a greater battle than Naseby or Marston Moor. They know that the marshalling of the forces which, at a period antecedent to that famous Petition, succeeded in winning a safe place on ‘the fleshy tables’ of the hearts of Englishmen for those political immunities it embodied—after the first written record had been vainly torn from the Council Book—was a feat of arms not less brilliant, in its way, than was that arraying of Ironsides, on much later days of the long strife, which resulted in ‘Darwen stream with blood of Scots imbued,’ and placed Worcester’s laureat wreath on the brow of Cromwell. There are many senses in which we have all of us (or nearly all) learnt to see the truth of the familiar words, ‘Peace hath her victories, not less renown’d than War,’ but in no sense have those words a deeper truth than when we simply invert Milton’s own application of them. By him they were pointed at something yet to be done, and which, as he hoped, might be done by Cromwell. Nowadays, the historian has good ground to point them at an earlier victory, won when the great soldier was but looking on at the parliamentary contest, which he could not much advance, and might very possibly have seriously impeded. The one thing which has transmuted Robert Cotton from the status of a dead antiquary into that of a living English worthy, is his close fellowship with Eliot, Rudyard, and Pym. His rights to a place amongst our national worthies is due—more than all else—to the fact that the services which he rendered in that strife of heroes were services which one man, and only one, throughout broad England had made himself capable of rendering. Cotton could no more have led the parliamentary phalanx, than he could have led the Ironsides. To stir men’s minds as Eliot or Pym could stir them was about as much in his power as it was to have invented logarithms, or to have written ‘Lear.’ But if he could not command the army, he could furnish the arsenal. At that day and under the then circumstances that service was priceless.
Sir Robert Cotton’s best and most memorable parliamentary service was rendered under Charles; not under James. But there is one incident in his public career which occurred just before the change in the wearers of the Crown that has a claim to mention, even in so brief a memoir as this.