When these Petitioners went on to state to Parliament that ‘no expression of gratitude can be too great ... for doing honour to the memory of Sir Robert Cotton,’ their assertion gave rise to no utterance of hostile feeling. |Recent Charges against the character and fame of Sir R. Cotton.| They were not even charged with undue laudation of their ancestor. People who at that time troubled themselves to think of such matters at all, were agreed in regarding Sir Robert Cotton as unquestionably one of the worthies of England. Nowadays—as I have had occasion to show already—there are many gainsayers. A distinguished historian (Mr. Gardiner) asperses Cotton’s character both for statesmanship and for truthfulness; whilst a distinguished archæologist (Mr. Brewer) charges him with embezzling records.
The first charge has been partly met, in these pages, by the simple apposition and collation of contemporary evidence. The reader has his choice between the cumulative testimony of several English peers and statesmen; and the unsupported testimony of one foreign diplomatist, who made it his boast to be the enemy of Englishmen, and whose hostility was graduated in tolerably exact accordance with the qualities and the deeds which have made England proud of them. The home witnesses gave their testimony whilst the events were still fresh in men’s minds. They gave it in broad daylight, and with open doors. The foreign witness put his evidence into a secret dispatch, to be seen by no human eye, out of the Spanish Cabinet, until our own historian disinterred it, at Simancas, two centuries and a half after date. Nor is this quite all.
If Gondomar’s account be true, not only was Sir Robert Cotton’s life as a statesman a protracted lie, but his duplicity was so superbly cloaked as to deceive the most keen-sighted of his contemporaries. The men who sat habitually at his board in his days of health, and who ministered at his bedside in all the offices of tender friendship in his days of sickness and of death, were all wrong about his character. |A Discours wether yt be fitt for Inglande to make peace with Spaine. MS. Cott. Vespas. C. xiii, ff. 160, seqq. (B. M.).| And there is this other little fact to boot: Sir Robert Cotton began his public life by as open a declaration of anti-Spanish policy in relation to the great question of the Netherlands as ever came from the lips of our Ralegh. He ended his public life with as staunch an adherence to the principles, both in Church and State, which the rulers of Spain abhorred as that which had been shown by Ralegh on the scaffold in Old Palace Yard, or by Eliot in the dungeon of the Tower of London. Meanwhile, just in the mid-channel of his career, and in the prime of his faculties, Sir Robert Cotton threw himself, gratuitously, at the feet of Gondomar. He humbly asked leave to take Spanish service in the guise of a political slave. The historian’s proposition is a bold one. And its evidence needs to be cogent. English readers now know quite enough about Gondomar to judge whether or not his sole testimony is sufficient to damn the fame of such a man as Cotton;—to degrade him from the rank of an English worthy;—to brand him as a criminal virtually convicted of apostacy in religion, and of treason to his avowed convictions in politics?[[24]]
From the nature of things the second charge cannot be so directly, so compactly, or so effectively met. Almost a third of the manuscripts which form the most important section of the Cotton Library consist of, or contain, Papers of State. Of these a very considerable proportion once belonged to the State. How came they to pass into the hands of Sir Robert Cotton?
Mr. Brewer’s Account of Sir R. Cotton’s Acquisition of State Papers.
By Mr. Brewer the question has been answered, unhesitatingly and exhaustively. Large portions of the Diplomatic Correspondence of Henry the Eighth were, he says, ‘carried off in 1614, if not before, by Sir Robert Cotton.... The original bundles appear to have been broken up under the keepership of Agarde, when the Treasury of the Exchequer was rifled of its most precious contents to augment the collections of Sir R. Cotton.... |Calendar of the State Papers; Reign of Henry VIII, Pref., pp. viii, ix.| For the early years of Henry, his [Sir Robert’s] collections are more numerous, and even more interesting, than the documents in the English, the French, or the Spanish Archives. They are equally authentic.... By what fraud or negligence they found their way into the possession of Sir Robert Cotton it is not for me to inquire.’
No writer can be better qualified to speak with authority on such a topic as this than is Mr. Brewer. Familiar with State Papers and with records of all kinds for a very long period, he has won the deep respect of all students of our history by the uses to which his knowledge has been applied. But the ablest writer will sometimes write hastily. The most impartial inquirer will now and then reach a conclusion by overleaping part of the evidence.
The sweeping passage which I have quoted, like other passages in Mr. Riley’s preface to Liber Custumarum, previously noticed, leaves altogether out of view three or four whole classes of testimony—chains not links—having a vital bearing on the issue. For example—
Sir T. Wilson to King James I, Domestic Corresp., vol. xcvi, § 41*, seqq. (R. H.)
I. It disregards the fact that certain bundles of State letters and papers were given by the King’s order to Sir Robert Cotton, during the reign of James the First. These, indeed, were commanded to be ‘subscriptions and signatures of Princes and great men, attached to letters otherwise unimportant.’ But who is to tell us what was the estimate of ‘importance’ in papers of State formed, two centuries and a half ago, by James, who gave the order, or by Sir Thomas Wilson, who received it?