When Sir Thomas Cotton came to sum up his losses he found that they amounted to more than four thousand pounds (in the money of that day). |Ib., ff. 71, seqq.| ‘They have had,’ he wrote, ‘£1500, in money; besides eleven horses, worth £140; Billeting at Conington, Eyworth, and other places, which came to £100; spoil made at Sawtrey and at St. Germans which £300 will not make good; and besides the decay of my rents to an amount of at least £600 a-year; ... and now the layers and taxes will take up the whole of Ladyday’s rent.’ |Ib., 74.| Meanwhile his unlucky tenants, in Huntingdonshire alone, had been deprived of a hundred and ninety horses, and their farms had been stripped both of provisions and of forage.
By way of pleasant diversity to his troubles in Huntingdonshire and Bedfordshire Sir Thomas received, presently, a letter from John Selden—the old and warmly-attached friend of his family—warning him that the capabilities of Cotton House in London had caught the eye of certain other Committee-men, and had made a deep impression on them. |The Attempt to seize on Cotton House.| They saw that it would do capitally both as a lodging house for the entertainment of distinguished strangers who might come to Westminster, to wait on the Parliament, and as a State prison for very eminent delinquents. These watchful Committee-men were also members of the Council of State; and the time had now come when King James’ sarcastic and well-remembered jest—‘Bring me sax chairs, for I see sax kings approaching’—was turning itself into a very awkward fact. These Committee-men, too, (like their humbler fellows at Huntingdon,) had their Serjeant at hand to give them advice on elastic points of law. ‘Serjeant Dendy,’ wrote Selden, ‘fairly told me that the Committee and Council were informed that, by the Patent under which you claim, it was provided that your interest [in Cotton House] should cease, during the time of the Parliament.’ |Selden to Sir T. Cotton; in an Appendix to Cotton MSS. marked ‘16. l.’ fol. 50 (B. M.)| Certainly, an awkward clause to appear in a man’s lease, in days when a Parliament, beginning its ‘time’ in 1641 had not quite ended it until 1660. This claim of the Council of State proved, in the sequel, to have in it no more of real validity than had that other claim to procure the Conington rents to be paid ‘to us at Huntingdon’; but, like that, it gave Sir Thomas Cotton a good deal of annoyance before he succeeded in getting quit of it.
It is much to his honour that petty but cumulative misfortunes like these did not sour Sir Thomas Cotton’s temper. When quieter times came, he showed himself the worthy son of his eminent father, both by the improvement of his library, at considerable charge, and by the liberality with which he lent his choicest manuscripts, and, in many ways, made them and his other collections serviceable to literature. The still extant acknowledgments of service of this sort from historians and great scholars are very numerous.[[19]]
By his first marriage with Margaret Howard, daughter of William Lord Howard of Naworth, Sir Thomas had one son and two daughters. By his second marriage with Alice Constable he had four sons, two of whom died without issue. Alice was the daughter and sole heir of Sir John Constable of Dromondley in Yorkshire, and the relict of Edmund Anderson of Eyworth and of Stratton in Bedfordshire, and she brought with her a considerable dowry.
Sir John Cotton, the eldest son of the first marriage, sat in Parliament for the borough of Huntingdon in the reign of Charles the Second, and for Huntingdonshire in that of James the Second. But he took no prominent part in public affairs. Like his father he was twice married. And his first wife became step-daughter as well as daughter-in-law to his father, being Dorothy, daughter and heir of Edmund Anderson of Eyworth above mentioned. His second wife was Elizabeth Honywood. He seems to have resembled his father both in his tastes for a quiet country life, and in the liberality with which he allowed (on reasonable cause and to proper persons) access to his library. Nor did Sir John, any more than Sir Thomas, escape animadversion, when he allowed himself to form his own judgment of the fitness or the timeliness of any particular application. |Autobiog. and Corresp., vol. ii, p. 40.| |History of the Reformation, vol. iii, Introd., p. 8. (Edit. of 1714.)| Caustic Symonds D’Ewes writes down Sir Thomas Cotton as ‘unworthy to be master of so inestimable a library.’ Caustic Bishop Burnet writes in his turn of Sir John Cotton: ‘A great Prelate had possessed him with such prejudices against me that ... he desired to be excused’ [from granting Burnet admittance to the Cottonian Library] ‘unless the Archbishop of Canterbury or a Secretary of State would recommend me as a person fit to have access.’ Against strictures such as these, it were easy, but is not needful, to adduce a score of acknowledgments of deep obligation, from writers more eminent by far than either D’Ewes or Burnet.
The eldest son (also John) of Sir John Cotton, by his wife Dorothy, did not live to inherit either the famous library or the ancestral estates. He died in 1681, and his later days seem to have been marked by some stormy incidents. In one point, his troubles resembled those which disturbed the last year of his great-grandfather’s life;—in so far as that they were caused by a lady. But whereas Sir Robert had the lady thrust upon him, to suit the purposes of other men, the misfortunes of his great-grandson appear to have grown out of an ardent but illicit passion—as ardently, and not less illicitly, returned by its object. Some scraps of their correspondence which have chanced to be preserved read, after two centuries of dusty repose, as if they were still all aflame with that fierce love which an experienced poet describes as ‘passion’s essence.’[[20]]
Sir John Cotton survived till nearly the close of the seventeenth century. He was succeeded in the baronetcy and estates by John, the son of the last-mentioned John Cotton, who had married Frances, daughter and heir of Sir George Downing of East Hatley in Cambridgeshire. Sir John, fourth baronet, married Elizabeth Herbert, one of the grand-daughters of Philip, Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery. Like his ancestors of many generations, this Sir John Cotton sat in Parliament for Huntingdonshire. His chief claim to honourable memory is that he settled the Cottonian Library on the British nation for ever, and thus made its founder, Sir Robert, the virtual and first Founder of the British Museum. This was done by Act of Parliament, in the year 1700.
This eminent public benefactor died, in 1731, without surviving issue. The baronetcy then reverted to Robert the eldest son of the second marriage of the first Sir John Cotton, grandson of the Founder. From Sir Robert, fifth baronet, the dignity came, in 1749, to a fourth ‘John Cotton’ who then became sixth baronet and who was the last surviving male heir of his honoured line.
Sir John had lost his only son—a fifth John—many years before his accession to the baronetcy, which, on his own death (27 March, 1752), became extinct. Conington had long previously passed to a younger son of Sir Thomas Cotton, second baronet; as shown in the following—
