Under the Commonwealth, the librarianship had been combined, first with the keepership of the Great Seal, and then with an Embassy to Sweden. Under the Restoration, it was held in plurality with an active commission in the Royal Navy. |Acquisition of the Theyer Library.| Charles II, however, caused some valuable additions to be made to the library. Of these the most important was the manuscript collection which had belonged, successively, to John and Charles Theyer. The sum given was £560. The collection came to St. James’ Palace in 1678. It was rich in historical manuscripts and in the curiosities of mediæval science. It embraced many of the treasured book-possessions of a long line of Abbots and Priors of Llanthony,[[29]] and the common-place-books of Archbishop Cranmer.
At Charles the Second’s death the number of works in the royal collection had increased to more than ten thousand. No doubt, in that reign, the books could have brought against their owner the pithy complaint to which Petrarch gave expression, on behalf of some of their fellows, at an earlier day: ‘Thou hast many books tied in chains which, if they could break away and speak, would bring thee to the judgment of a private prison.... |Petrarch, De remediis utriusque fortunæ.| They would weep to think that one man—ostentatious of a possession for which he hath no use—should own a host of those precious things that many a passionate student doth wholly lack.’
No true lover of books, for their own sake, indeed, was ever to possess that rich collection, until it passed into the ownership of the nation. Its entail, so to speak, as a heirloom of the Crown, was cut off, just as it was about to pass into the hands of the one English King who alone, of all the Monarchs since Charles the First, cared about books. That it should pass to the Nation had been proposed by Richard Bentley, when himself royal librarian, sixty years before the proposal became a fact. ‘’Tis easy to foresee,’ said Bentley, ‘how much the glory of our Nation will be advanced by erecting a Free Library of all sorts of books.’ In his day, he saw no way to such an establishment, otherwise than by transfer of the royal collection.
There is a reasonable, perhaps it might be said a strong, probability that when Bentley gave expression to this wish, at the close of the seventeenth century, he was unconsciously reviving one among many projects for the public good which had been temporarily buried in the grave of Prince Henry. For under the Commonwealth, the Library at St. James’ had been ‘Public’ rather in name than in fact.
The ultimate incorporation of the Royal Library with the Collections of Sloane and of Cotton.
When the time came, the number of volumes of the Royal Collection which remained to be incorporated with the Museum of Sloane and with the Library of Sir Robert Cotton was somewhat more than twelve thousand. The number of separate works—printed and manuscript together—probably exceeded fifteen thousand.
Amongst the acquisitions so gained by the nation the first place of honour belongs to the Codex Alexandrinus. It stands, by the common consent of biblical palæographers, in a class of manuscripts of the Holy Scriptures into which only two or three other codices in the world can claim to be admitted. Of early English chronicles there is a long series which to their intrinsic interest as primary materials of our history add the ancillary interest of having been transcribed—sometimes of having been composed—expressly for presentation to the reigning Monarch. Here also, among a host of other literary curiosities, is the group of romances which John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, caused to be compiled for Margaret of Anjou; and the autograph Basilicon, written for Prince Henry. Among the innumerable printed treasures are choice books which accrued as presentation copies to the sovereigns of the House of Tudor, beginning with a superb series of illuminated books on vellum, from the press of Anthony Verard of Paris, given to Henry the Seventh. For large as had been the losses sustained by the original royal library, and truly as it may be said that Prince Henry’s acquisitions amounted virtually to its re-foundation, many of the finest books of long anterior date had survived their varied perils. And some others have rejoined, from time to time, their old companions, after long absence.
The royal collection has also an adventitious interest—in addition to the main one—from another point of view. It includes results of the strong-handed confiscations of our kings, as well as of the purchases they made, and the gifts they received. Both the royal manuscripts and the royal printed books contain many memorials of careers in which our poets no less than our historians have found, and are likely to find, an undying charm.
CHAPTER IV.
THE COLLECTOR OF THE ARUNDELIAN MSS.
‘The English nobles are high-spirited, active, educated men, born to wealth and power, who have run through every country and have kept, in every country, the best company; have seen every secret of art and nature; and—when men of any ability or ambition—have been consulted in the conduct of every important action. You cannot wield great agencies without lending yourself to them. When it happens that the spirit of the Earl meets his rank and his duties, we have the best examples.... These are the men who make England that strong-box and Museum it is; who gather and protect works of art, dragged from amidst burning cities and revolutionary countries, and brought hither, out of all the world.... When I saw that, besides deer and pheasants, these men have preserved Arundel Marbles, Townley Galleries, Howard and Spencer Libraries, Warwick and Portland Vases, Saxon Manuscripts, Monastic Architectures, and Millenial Trees, I pardoned their high park-fences.’—