up.[348] Many gifts of books were received, some from the highest in the land: from King Henry the Fourth and his warlike and ambitious sons—Henry V, Clarence, Bedford, and Gloucester; from Edmund, Earl of March; from prelates—Archbishop Arundel, Repyngton of Lincoln, Courtney of Norwich, and Molyneux of Chichester; from great Abbot Whethamstede of St. Albans; from wealthy Archdeacon Browne or Cordone; from rich citizens of London—Thomas Knolles the grocer and T. Grauntt; and from Henry VI’s physician, John Somersett. John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, also promised books worth five hundred marks, but after his death they did not come to hand.[349]
By far the most generous of friends was the Duke of Gloucester, whose first gift was made before 1413,[350] and his last when he died in 1447. His record as the helper and protector of Oxford, his patronage of learning, and of such exponents of it as Titus Livius of Forli, Leonardo Bruni, Lydgate and Capgrave, the fact that, notwithstanding his “staat and dignyte,”
“His courage never doth appall
To study in bokes of antiquitie,”
earned for him the name of the “good” duke—an appellation to which the shady labyrinth of his career as a politician, as a persecutor of the Lollards, and as a licentious man, did not entitle him. But then Oxford—and its library—was most in need of such a friend as this English Gismondo Malatesta; not only on account of his generosity, but because his royal connexions enabled him to exert influence on the University’s behalf, both at home and abroad.