The editors of the Peerages, ever attentive to any disclosure that may add dignity to the noble families whose lives and actions are the subjects of their labours, were not unmindful of this discovery made by the learned Archdeacon. The book so popular in this country under the name of Collins’s Peerage was published by the industrious and highly respectable Arthur Collins, then a bookseller at the Black Boy in Fleet-street, in a single volume, in the year 1709. In the account of the Devonshire family no more is said of Sir William Cavendish than had been told by Dugdale, and than is the undoubted truth[38]. But when, in 1712, a new edition appeared, we find added to the account of Sir William Cavendish all that the Archdeacon had said of Mr. Cavendish, the attendant upon Wolsey: but with this remarkable difference, arising probably in nothing more blameworthy than inattention, that while Kennet had written “for without express authority we may gather from circumstances, &c.” Collins says, “for with express authority we may gather from circumstances, &c.[39]” A third edition appeared in 1715, in two volumes, in which no change is made in the Cavendish article[40]. In 1735 the Peerage had assumed a higher character, and appeared with the arms engraven on copper-plates, in four handsome octavo volumes. In this edition we find the whole article has been recomposed; and we no longer hear of the gathering from circumstances, or the with or without express authority; but the account of Sir William Cavendish’s connexion with the Cardinal is told with all regularity, dovetailed with authentic particulars of his life, forming a very compact and, seemingly, consistent story[41]. The only material change that has been introduced in the successive editions of a work which has been so often revised and reprinted, has arisen from the discovery made by some later editor, that my Lord Herbert had quoted the work as the production of a George Cavendish. The gentle editors were not however to be deprived of what tended in their opinion so much to the credit of the house of Cavendish, and rendered the account they had to give of its founder so much more satisfactory. Without ceremony, therefore, they immediately put down the quotation to the inaccuracy and inattention of that noble author.
The Biographia.
Having once gained an establishment in a work so highly esteemed and so widely dispersed, and carrying a primâ facie appearance of truth, it is easy to see how the error would extend itself, especially as in this country the number of persons is so small who attend to questions of this nature, and as the means of correcting it were not so obvious as since the publication of the “Ecclesiastical Biography.” But it assumed its most dangerous consequence by its introduction into the Biographia. The greatest blemish of that extremely valuable collection of English lives seems to be that its pages are too much loaded with stale genealogy taken from the commonest of our books. Wherever Collins afforded them information, the writers of that work have most gladly accepted of it, and have
“—————whisper’d whence they stole
Their balmy sweets,”
by using in many instances his own words. His facts they seem to have generally assumed as indubitable. In the present instance nothing more was done than to new-mould the account given of Sir William Cavendish in the later editions of the Peerage, and, by an unprofitable generalization of the language, to make his mixture of truth and fable more palatable to the taste of their readers.
Bragg the bookseller.
Poor Arthur Collins was not the only bookseller who took advantage of the learned archdeacon’s unfortunate conjecture. There was one Bragg, a printer, at the Blue Ball in Ave Maria Lane, a man of no very high character in his profession, who published in 1706 an edition of Cavendish’s Life of Wolsey, taken from the second edition by Dorman Newman, and with all the errors and omissions of that most unfaithful impression. Copies were remaining upon his shelves when Kennet’s sermon made its appearance. Rightly judging that this must cause inquiries to be made after a book, the production of one who was the progenitor of a person and family at that particular period, from a concurrence of circumstances, the subject of universal conversation, he cancelled the anonymous title-page of the remaining copies, and issued what he called a “Second Edition,” with a long Grub-street title beginning thus:
Sir William Cavendish’s
Memoirs of the Life of Cardinal Wolsey,
&c.
This has sometimes been mistaken for a really new edition of the work.