Edward Edwards

“ Edward, Earl of Oxford, had stood at one period of his life, in the rank of the wealthiest of Englishmen. He was the owner of estates worth some four or five hundred thousand pounds. He was, too, a man of highly intellectual and studious tastes; but, in his case, a magnificent style of living, great generosity, and excessive trust in dependants, did what is more usually the work of huge folly or of gross sins; they brought him into circumstances which, for his position in life, might almost be called those of poverty. ”

“ With some of this man’s contemporaries it was quite otherwise. Some English statesmen whose names we have all learnt to venerate, looked upon the murder of Overbury as a revengeful deed instigated by Lady Somerset, wholly without her husband’s complicity; and they looked at Somerset’s conviction of complicity in the crime as simply the issue of a skilfully-managed court intrigue, for a court object. They knew that Somerset’s enemies had been wont to say amongst themselves, ‘A nail is best driven out by driving in another nail,’ and had, very effectually, put the proverb into action. ”

“ The one thing which has transmuted Robert Cotton from the status of a dead antiquary into that of a living English worthy, is his close fellowship with Eliot, Rudyard, and Pym. His rights to a place amongst our national worthies is due—more than all else—to the fact that the services which he rendered in that strife of heroes were services which one man, and only one, throughout broad England had made himself capable of rendering. ”

“ He acquitted himself of an arduous task with eminent ability, and with an impartiality which won respect, alike from the managers of the impeachment and from the friends of the doomed statesman. The only person who expressed dissatisfaction with Arundel’s conduct on that critical occasion was the King. The historians who have most deeply and acutely scanned the details of that most memorable of all our State Trials are agreed that in order to have satisfied Charles, the Earl of Arundel must have betrayed the duty of his high office. ”

“ Cotton may be regarded as the English ‘proto-collector,’ in a point of view other than that which concerns the British Museum. No Library in the United Kingdom can, I think, shew an integral ‘Collection,’ still extant, the formation of which—as a Collection—can be traced to an earlier date than that of the collection of the Cottonian Manuscripts.
Whether the British Museum shall continue to be the great national repository for Science, as well as for Literature and Antiquities, is a question which is fast ripening for decision; and it is one which ought to be interesting to all Britons. ”

“ As far, indeed, as regards a public and national care for matters of the intellect, France is far better entitled to claim a priority in the proud distinction of ‘teaching the nations how to live,’ than is any other country in the world. It is to her immortal honour that from a very early period, and even in times of sore trouble, her sovereigns and her statesmen have known how to turn public resources to the promotion of public culture, as well as of national power. ”

“ The gift embraced several Biblical Manuscripts of value, and a still choicer series of early printed books, one hundred and eighty in number. The giver has a merited place in the roll of our public benefactors; and his devout prayer for the new Museum, ‘May it increase and multiply ... to the benefit of the people of these nations and of the whole earth,’ has had a more conspicuous fulfilment than could, in 1759, have been imagined by the most sanguine of bystanders. ”

“ In the chief countries of the Continent of Europe—on the other hand—great national Museums have, commonly, had their origin in the liberality and wise foresight either of some sovereign or other, or of some powerful minister whose mind was large enough to combine with the cares of State a care for Learning. In Britain, our chief public collection of literature and of science originated simply in the public spirit of private persons. ”

“ 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? ”

“ He laid the foundation of a new English trade with Italy and created—it is not saying too much—the maritime prosperity of Leghorn. He drained vast Italian marshes, and made corn to grow where corn had never grown before. The man who, in early life, had won fame at once as a navigator full of pluck and resource, and as an able soldier by sea and land:—and who, on attaining full manhood, had shown himself both a clever diplomatist and a great engineer;—did not go to his foreign grave before he had won literary fame with the pen, and scientific fame at the furnace of the chemist. ”

“ Had the policy of Robert Cotton and of John Eliot prevailed a quarter of a century sooner, there would (very probably) have been no county committees of sequestrators; no political scaffolds at Whitehall; no ruling of England by brute force under artificers suddenly transformed into generals; no wholesale massacres in Ireland, fraught with mischief for the whole empire during centuries to come. ”

“ Were it not, however, for one pregnant circumstance in Sir Robert Cotton’s subsequent life, all this would have but a very meager attractiveness for nineteenth-century readers. The story of the growth of a great library has its charm, but the sphere of potency is of small dimension. Few but those who are themselves imbued with a spice of literary antiquarianism ever enter within the narrow circle. ”

“ This ‘scrupulous Puritan’ knew all that was current about the terrible ‘Great Oyer of Poisoning,’ as Sir Edward Coke called it. He lived in familiar intercourse with Cotton, and regarded their long acquaintance as an honour to himself; whilst speaking freely about certain social habits and limitations—neither Grandisonian or Puritanic—on Cotton’s part, as precluding their intercourse from ripening into that close friendship which such a man as D’Ewes could form only with men likeminded with himself on the highest interests of humanity. ”

“ A private citizen, of moderate means, had been willing to expend seventy or eighty thousand pounds—besides an inestimable 311amount of labour and research—upon an object essentially and largely public. Yet a British Parliament could not summon up enough of public spirit to tax its own members, in common with their tax-paying fellow subjects throughout the realm, to the extent of a hundred thousand pounds, in order to meet an obvious public want, to redeem an actual parliamentary pledge, and to secure a conspicuous national honour for all time to come. ”

“ To the conspicuous merits which belong to Sir Robert Cotton as a politician of no mean acumen, and as,—in the event,—the real Founder of the British Museum, are added the still higher distinctions of an eminently generous spirit and a faithful heart. ”

“ Henry Howard (now Earl of Northampton) ,—whatever the intrinsic baseness and perfidy of his nature, was a man of large capacity. He was not unfriendly to reform,—when abuses put no pelf in his own pocket. To naval reforms, his nearness of blood to Nottingham, the Lord High Admiral, tended rather to predispose him; for when near relatives dislike one another, the intensity of their dislike is sometimes wonderful to all bystanders. Interest made these two sometimes allies, but it never made them friends. Northampton gave his whole influence in favour of Sir Robert’s plan. ”

“ In both Houses of Parliament, Oxford’s veiled and vacillating policy was fast alienating men who had long supported him, and who to the last retained more confidence in him than in his brilliant rival. The crisis, however, was brought about, not by the increased strength of Parliamentary opposition, but by bed-chamber intrigues, such as those which he had himself stooped to employ six years before against Godolphin and Marlborough. ”

“ The difficulties at Constantinople proved to be almost trivial in comparison with those which ensued at Athens. Every step was met, both by the official persons and the people generally, with jealousy and obstruction. If a scaffold was put up, the Turks were sure that it was with a view to look into the harem of some neighbouring house. If a fragment of sculpture was examined with any visible delight or eagerness, they were equally sure that it must contain hidden gold. ”

“ Here it may suffice to say that while Sir Robert Cotton was plainly at one with the Parliamentarian leaders in the main points of their civil policy, he never went to the extreme lengths of the puritanic faith, either in things secular, or in matters pertaining to Religion. On some religious questions he differed from them widely. In secular matters, a tyrannic Parliament would have been as little to his liking as a despotic king. Neither friend nor enemy—Gondomar excepted—ever called him a Puritan (or pretended-Puritan) in his lifetime, any more than they would have called him a Republican. ”

“ The writer of this counsel knows, perfectly, that already the King’s poverty is the Parliament’s power; and that to build fortresses and array soldiers needs a full purse, not an exhausted one. But he says,—as Wentworth said after him,—that soldiers can be set to work upon good hopes of the pay to come. A resolute King, he thinks, with resolute troops at his back, could do in England what had so often been done in Italy. He could tithe men’s estates. He could make salt and some other things of prime necessity a royal monopoly. He could set a tariff on dignities of honour. ”

“ Every passage, save one, which bears at all on Oxford’s intercourse with Jacobite emissaries, up to the year 1715, tends to show that what they asserted about his intentions on the Pretender’s behalf was built on wishes, hopes, and guesses—on anything rather than knowledge. Every passage, save one, tends to show that he was using the Jacobites for his own purposes, without the least idea of aiding theirs. ”

“ And for some years to come the new Ambassador found the Neapolitan society little to his taste. He was intellectual, and, in the truest sense, an English gentleman. The tone of society at that time in Naples was both frivolous and dissolute. He had to form, by slow degrees, a circle in which a man of cultivated tastes might enjoy social life. The public duties of the embassy could employ but a small portion of his time, and the temper of the man made employment to him a necessary of life. ”

“ Nor is it less evident that, over and above the political and public interest of the things done, or initiated, by the new comers in their adopted country, the personal and family annals of the exiles possess, in not a few instances, a remarkable though subsidiary interest of their own. In certain cases, to trace the fortunes of a refugee family, is at once to throw some gleams of light on obscure portions of our commercial history, and to tell a romantic story of real life. ”

“ For, at Rome, he had been enabled to show a sample of his acquisitions to a man who was something more than a dilettante. ‘These,’ said Canova, ‘are the works of the ablest artists the world has seen.’
When consulted on the point whether restoration should, in any instance, be attempted, the reply of the great Italian sculptor was in these words: ‘The Parthenon Marbles have never been retouched. It would be sacrilege in me—sacrilege in any man—to put a chisel on them.’
Lord Elgin came to England with the intention of offering his whole Collection to the British Government, unconditionally. ”

“ The true name had been preserved only in the records of interminable litigation—in England, Holland, India, and America—about the scattered 249wreck of a magnificent property. But the enterprise of the family, in its palmy days, had planted for England a prosperous colony. It had opened new paths to commerce in the East Indies, as well as in the West. And its last survivor found a solace for many ruined hopes in the collection of treasures of science, art and literature, which came to be important enough to form no small contribution towards the eventual foundation of the British Museum. ”