The Franks Collection of Armorial Book-Stamps27
Some little time after the death of Sir Augustus Wollaston Franks the Library of the British Museum acquired, through the kindness of his successor in the Keepership of Mediæval Antiquities, Mr. C. H. Read, some three hundred books, of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, bearing on their bindings armorial book-stamps. For lack of a better word these three hundred books have been dignified in the heading of this article by the title of a ‘collection,’ but it is due to the great reputation of Sir Wollaston Franks as a collector to say that he himself would probably have smiled if he had heard them called so. As all bookish people know, one of his real hobbies was the collection of book-plates, his countless specimens of which passed at his death to another department of the British Museum, that of Prints and Drawings, where considerable progress has been made in describing and cataloguing them. By the side of his thousands of book-plates these three hundred or so old books with armorial stamps on their covers are a merely subsidiary collection, sufficient to illustrate the method of marking ownership, which book-plates first rivalled and then, alas, almost entirely superseded.
The £500 which Sir Wollaston Franks gave for the copy of the ‘Ptolemy’ of 1490, with the badge of Mary Queen of Scots, recently the subject of one of the Bibliographical Society’s Monographs, shows the spirit in which he would have pursued the collection of armorial bindings had he taken it up seriously. As it was, he seems to have given a standing order to several booksellers to send him any books or odd volumes, of which the chief value lay in the stamped arms, and which they were willing to sell for a small sum, and to have taken his chance. There are worse ways of collecting than this, for a bookseller who knows that he can always place a book of a certain class with a customer, will often be content to buy it at a venture for a small price and pass it on at once at a few shillings’ profit without examining it very carefully or inquiring too curiously into its market value. As will be seen from some of the books soon to be mentioned, this was certainly the experience in this instance of Sir Wollaston Franks, and the foregoing depreciation of the specimens he thus got together must be understood as written solely to prevent his name in the title of this article from raising expectation too high.
Before describing any individual specimens, it may be worth while to say a few words about book-stamps in general. Compared with book-plates, of which the literature during the last ten or twelve years has grown with such rapidity, they have as yet received very little attention outside France, where Guigard’s ‘Armorial du Bibliophile’ in its second edition (1892) gives as full information about most French examples as can reasonably be desired. In the third volume of ‘Bibliographica,’ Mr. W. Y. Fletcher wrote an interesting article on ‘English Armorial Book-stamps,’ and it is much to be wished that he could be persuaded to print in full his notes on the subject, which are certainly more complete— or less incomplete—than those in the possession of any one else. A few years ago the Grolier Club of New York held an exhibition of books bearing these marks of ownership, and printed a small catalogue of it, which I have not had the advantage of seeing. Other information, as far as I am aware, can only be obtained by painful search in books of heraldry and genealogy and in biographies.
Towards the close of the age of manuscripts, it became a fairly common practice, more especially in Italy, for book-lovers to cause their arms to be painted as part of the decoration of the first page of text. In the last years of the fifteenth century book-plates came into use in Germany, and during the next hundred years were slowly adopted both in France and England. But until the sixteenth century was far advanced the commonest way of marking possession of a book in England remained that of inscribing the owner’s name on the title-page or a fly-leaf. Thus all the books in the large libraries of Archbishop Cranmer and Lord Lumley bear their names, ‘Thomas Cantuariensis’ and ‘Lumley,’ in the handwriting of their secretaries or librarians. One or two instances are found of names printed or written on book-edges. That of ‘Anna Regina Anglie,’ i.e. Anne Boleyn, on a vellum presentation copy of Tyndale’s New Testament of 1534, is a well-known example of this. On the outside of books names are found from a very early period; but in the fifteenth century and the early years of the sixteenth they are mostly those, not of the owners of the volume, but of the bookbinder, as in the case of Conrad of Strasburg, Johann Richenbach, and André Boule. Every one, however, knows the inscriptions which the three great collectors, Grolier, Maioli, and Lauwrin put on their books. As the sixteenth century grew older the names or initials of the owner, with sometimes a date added, are found on a fair number of bindings. In Germany such names and dates were frequently branded in black on pigskin bindings. In other countries the names are, as a rule, stamped in gold. As late as the eighteenth century Lord Oxford used to stamp his name, ‘Robert Harley,’ on his books, in addition to his arms.
Coming at last to armorial book-stamps, we find that from the fifteenth century onwards books were often impressed with the royal arms. These were used both as marks of possession and also, at least in England (as noted by Mr. Davenport in his article on ‘Some Popular Errors as to old Bindings’ in vol. ii. of ‘The Library’), as decorative designs on the trade bindings of loyal stationers. Crowned initials and royal badges are often found, and these nearly always mark royal ownership. When this use of armorial book-stamps was first adopted by collectors beneath the royal rank is not easy to say. Grolier is said to have occasionally placed his arms on his books, but I believe that until about 1560, the practice did not become at all common even in foreign countries, and in England it was probably some ten years later. It is, perhaps, worth noting that in France the fashion must undoubtedly have received a great impetus from the sumptuary law of 1577, which restricted the use of the elaborate ‘fanfare’ style of ornamenting books to those in royal ownership. The splendid bindings of a few of the books of Jacques Auguste de Thou (associated, rightly or wrongly, with the name of Nicolas Eve) must all have been executed before this date. Thereafter he adopted the plain morocco covers decorated only with the stamps of his arms with which all book-lovers are familiar. Other collectors followed his example, and in their respective kinds both the strong, massively stamped books of De Thou, and the more finely grained red moroccos of later French bookmen, in which the tiny stamp of arms has a Legasconesque delicacy of finish, offer examples of simple decoration which the wealthiest collector may well imitate.
Of books bearing the arms of French collectors upwards of one hundred and fifty were brought together by Sir Wollaston Franks, but the English stamps, which number rather over a hundred, must engage our first attention. One of the earliest of these is a small stamp of the arms of Archbishop Parker, forming the centre of a rather decorative binding, obviously of English work. The book it is found on is a copy of Beza’s Latin New Testament, printed at London by Vautrollier, in 1574, on the yellow paper occasionally used during the middle of the sixteenth century, presumably as less trying to the eyes than the ordinary white. Parker’s patronage of John Day is well known, but in view of the likelihood of this being a presentation copy to the Archbishop from Vautrollier, it would be rash to credit Day with the binding of this volume, which is, moreover, not quite so original as Day’s work at its best.
Two other books in the Franks collection are connected by their stamps with Parker’s royal mistress. One of these bears the well-known Falcon badge which Elizabeth adopted in imitation of her mother. This is found on a copy of Etienne Dolet’s ‘De Latina lingua’ printed at Basel in 1539. I do not know if the point has been raised and settled as to whether this badge was used by Elizabeth, both as queen and as princess, but there is at least nothing to prevent our supposing that this treatise of Dolet’s was one of Elizabeth’s school-books, and thus often in her hands. It is at least a point in favour of such a supposition that the badge in this case is sharper and fresher than on any other book I have ever seen. The other Elizabethan book in the collection is even more interesting, for its covers are embossed with the portrait-stamp of the queen here reproduced, and no other instance of the use of the stamp is recorded. The book is the Plantin Greek Testament of 1583, an edition which the queen would be very likely to possess. But whether this copy was ever in her library we have no means of deciding, the alternatives of presentation to and presentation by, of ownership by the original of the portrait or by some loyal subject, being very equally balanced. The stamp in this case is slightly raised, and is the earliest instance of a cameo stamp on any English binding.
The only other sixteenth-century English armorial stamps in the collection are two examples of the stamp used by William Cecil, Lord Burleigh, one in gold on a copy of the Greek Testament of Erasmus printed at Basel in 1570, the other in silver on a Hebrew Bible issued from the press of Plantin in 1583. It is certainly a very decorative stamp, but I must confess to preferring to it the simple inscription ‘William’ and ‘Mildred Cicyll’ on a binding which entered the Museum with the old Royal Library. In the present collection a little Lyons Virgil printed by Gryphius in 1571, though with a decorative instead of an heraldic stamp, bears the initials, ‘W.P.,’ of an English owner, a book-plate of ‘The Right Honble. Robert James Ld Petre, Thorndon in Essex,’ combined with a manuscript note, dated 1589, enabling us to identify W. P. with William Petre the second Baron (1575-1607). The note, apparently written when Petre was fourteen years old, records that the book was acquired by exchange with a certain Dominus Bigge.
Passing to the seventeenth century, we may notice first two books which bear the Towneley arms, Nichols’s translation of Thucydides printed at London in 1550, and the ‘Scholia in quatuor Evangelia’ of Lyons, 1602. The arms are stamped in silver instead of the more usual gold, and alone of all the book-stamps with which I am acquainted they bear a date, that of the year 1603. Readers familiar with Mr. Hardy’s excellent little treatise on Bookplates may remember that the Towneley plate which forms its frontispiece bears the date 1702, just a century later. The two marks of ownership are really, however, separated by a somewhat smaller interval, for while 1702 is no doubt the date of the plate (such dated plates being unusually common at the beginning of the eighteenth century), the 1603 of the book-stamp is probably the birth-date of Christopher Towneley, the antiquary, who was born at Towneley Hall, Lancashire, on 9th January 1603, old style.
We come now to an interesting group of books, once in the possession of Ralph Sheldon, the seventeenth-century antiquary. The first of these bears not his own arms but those of Augustine Vincent, the Windsor Herald, which two years ago attracted attention from being found, stamped in blind, on the splendid copy of the first Folio Shakespeare presented to him by William Jaggard, one of its publishers.28 In the present instance they are impressed in gold on Estienne de Cypres’ ‘Genealogies de soixante et sept tres nobles Maisons,’ printed at Paris in 1586. Augustine Vincent died in 1626, and his son sold his books to Ralph Sheldon, who on his death in 1684 bequeathed his manuscripts to the College of Arms. The printed books apparently remained for some time in the possession of the family, for this volume bears a Sheldon book-plate, and Sir Wollaston Franks was able to purchase two other books with Ralph Sheldon’s book-stamp, Campian’s ‘Historia Anglicana’ (Douay, 1632), and the ‘Prophecies’ of Nostradamus (London, 1672). On both of these the Sheldon arms are quartered with those of Ralph’s wife (Henrietta Maria, daughter of Thomas Savage, Viscount Rock Savage), and both books have written in them the motto, ‘In Posterum,’ apparently in Ralph’s autograph. A third book, Greenway’s translation of the ‘Annals’ of Tacitus (London, 1640), bears on its title-page the autograph of ‘Geo. Sheldon,’ and on the cover the Sheldon arms as here shown.
The next two volumes we may note are Thomas Mason’s ‘Of the Consecration of Bishops in the Church of England’ (1613), and the ‘Works’ of King James I. (1616), both of them bearing the Hatton arms. From their dates these must therefore have belonged not to Elizabeth’s favourite, whose arms are figured in Mr. Fletcher’s article, since he died in 1591, but to a son of his cousin of the same name, of Clay Hall, Barking. This third Christopher Hatton was baptized and probably born in 1605, and was a prominent man during the reign of Charles I., by whom he was created Baron Hatton in 1643. He was responsible for an edition of the Psalms with prayers attached (1644), which went by the name of Hatton’s ‘Psalter,’ and was philosopher enough to be able to make himself happy with his ‘books and fiddles’ while a Royalist exile.
A few of these early seventeenth-century books possess bindings interesting for other reasons besides their marks of ownership. Thus, a fine Hebrew folio is decorated not only with the arms of John Williams, Bishop of Lincoln, but with some striking examples of the handsome, if heavy, corner-pieces in vogue in the reign of James I. On a copy of Brent’s ‘History of the Council of Trent’ the arms of Berkeley look all the better for being inclosed in a handsome scroll-work centrepiece. So again we find both fine cornerpieces and a good central stamp on the three volumes of the works of that learned divine William Perkins (London, 1612), which bear also the initials H. L. beneath a coronet. The owner was presumably Henry Yelverton, created Viscount Longueville in 1690, to whom also belonged a copy of the 1660 edition of More’s ‘Explanation of the Grand Mystery of Godliness.’ On the Perkins volumes his coroneted initials were plainly added as an afterthought, while a much smaller M. Y., inclosed in the cornerpieces as part of the original design, suggests that the volume had in the first instance belonged to Mary Yelverton, the wife of the Judge of Court of Common Pleas, who died in 1630.
The works of Perkins were popular in the seventeenth century, and Sir Wollaston Franks acquired another edition of them, that of 1626, bearing the arms of one of the descendants of Thomas Smythe, Farmer of the Customs in the reign of Elizabeth, whose arms combined with those of his wife, Alice Judde, were figured by Mr. Fletcher. The coat now in question may have belonged either to his grandson, Thomas, who was not created Viscount Strangford until two years after the publication of the book, or to the Viscount’s brother, the ambassador to the Court of Russia, who fitted out an Arctic expedition, and has his munificence commemorated in the name of ‘Smith’s Sound.’
A copy of the 1617 edition of Spenser’s ‘Faery Queen,’ bearing the initials M. C. beneath a coronet, offers another example of a mark of ownership attached by a descendant of the original possessor. Who M. C. was is explained by the pretentious inscription on a book-plate inside the cover, which proclaims itself the property of ‘The Right Honble Mary, wife of Charles, Earle of Carnarvon & Sister of James, Earle of Abingdon.’ The Earl of Carnarvon here named was the second earl, Charles Dormer, who died in 1709, and his countess was the daughter of Montague Bertie, Earl of Lindsey, by his second wife Bridget, Baroness Norreys of Rycote. This descent accounts for the inscription on the title-page, ‘Norreys, 1647,’ and we may conclude that the volume was at one time owned either by the Baroness Norreys or her first husband. The book-plate of the Countess of Carnarvon is here reproduced as presumably a rather early example of a lady’s plate in the heraldic style. It certainly does not deserve the honour for its artistic merits, the design and engraving being as poor as the inscription is foolish.
Copies of a Commelinus Tacitus (1595) and a Horace, Persius and Juvenal (London, 1614-15) bear the arms of John Maitland, created Viscount Lauderdale in 1616; those of the Earl of Huntingdon are found on a Camden’s ‘Britannica’ of 1627; those of William Covert of Sussex, on the 1615 edition of the works of Gervase Babington; The Right Hon.ble Mary Wife of Charles Earle of Carnarvon & Sister of James Earle of Abingdon those of Chetwynd, on Matthew of Westminster’s ‘Flores Historiarum’ (Frankfort, 1601); those of Wilmer on Stowe’s ‘Survey of London,’ 1618. Further investigation would no doubt yield a tale as to each of these volumes, but we may not linger over them. We must stop, however, to note that the arms of Archbishop Laud, on a copy of his ‘Relation of a conference with Fisher the Jesuit,’ do not clearly indicate that this was his own library copy, since an inscription (apparently in Laud’s handwriting) informs us that the book was ‘presented by ye author to Sr Jo. Bramston, Ch[ief] Ju[stice] of the K[ing’s] B[ench],’ a book-plate of one of whose descendants, ‘Thomas Bramston, Esq., of Skreens,’ is found in the volume. In the same way, in the next century, we find Speaker Onslow possessed of a copy of Locke’s ‘Letters concerning Toleration,’ presented to him by Thomas Hollis, and bearing some of the donor’s favourite emblems, the cap of liberty, the owl of Minerva and a pen, with the motto ‘Placidam sub libertate quietem.’ There is no special reason to suppose that either Archbishop Laud or Hollis intended these volumes originally for their libraries, and after having had them bound with that intention subsequently gave them away. It may, of course, have been so, but we should not entirely exclude the supposition that books were also sometimes impressed with the arms or device of the donor, in order to remind the recipient of the source whence the gift came, just as we find gift-plates alongside of the more usual book-plates denoting personal ownership.
Owing to the library of Sir Kenelm Digby having been seized after his death in France under the inhospitable French law which gave to the king the chattels of strangers dying in his country, books with his arms are not often found in England. Sir Wollaston Franks was, therefore, fortunate in obtaining three volumes thus decorated, two of them showing his coat with that of his first wife, Venetia Stanley on an escutcheon of pretence, as figured in Mr. Fletcher’s article, while the third bears his coat impaled with hers, and is much more finely cut.
The arms of the Duke of Albemarle are found on the 1634 edition of Harrington’s ‘Orlando Furioso,’ those of the Earl of Arlington on a copy of a Spanish religious work, ‘Trabajos de Iesus,’ printed at Madrid in 1647, those of Lord Cornwallis, with a cipher imitated from that of Charles II., on a 1669 edition of the Book of Common Prayer. Other seventeenth-century collectors of minor note might be mentioned, but we must pass on now beyond the Revolution of 1688, and notice a few coats of later date. A copy of Dryden’s ‘Miscellany Poems’ of 1702 bears the arms of Charles, Lord Halifax (‘the Treasurer’), as well as a book-plate dated with the same year, 1702; a Roman History of 1695 and a Prayer Book of 1700 carry two different stamps of the arms of John, Lord Somers; there are three books with the stamp and name of Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, and three with the Carteret arms. Of these last two, Hammond’s ‘Sermons’ and the ‘Divi Britannici,’ both published in 1675, bear ‘the bloody hand’ that marks a baronet, while a Horace of Paris, 1567, shows Lord Carteret’s arms as a peer. On Sanderson’s ‘Nature and Obligation of Conscience’ (1722) we have another instance of a lady’s book-stamp, that of Cassandra Willoughby, Duchess of Chandos; the arms and book-plate of the Duke of Montagu are found on a copy of Bishop Berkeley’s famous treatise on the virtues of tar-water (1744); lastly, a Utrecht Callimachus of 1697 is adorned with the arms of Sir Philip Sydenham, Bart., and with the book-plate of John Wilkes, who, if a demagogue, was a demagogue of classical tastes.
These eighteenth-century books and their owners are somewhat less interesting than the earlier ones to which most of this article has been devoted, and in attempting to enumerate them it is difficult to avoid the style of a catalogue. The danger is all the greater when we turn to the French books, for here Guigard has been before us, and there is no purpose to be served by making extracts from his pages. As might be expected, the collection contains more than one specimen of the books of De Thou, in which the British Museum was already fairly rich. Among other notable stamps of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries we may mention that of Antoine de Leve, Abbé de l’Isle en Barrois, on three books published between 1574 and 1624; of Estampes de Valency on a book of 1557; of Peiresc (on a ‘Harpocrationis Dictionarium,’ 1614), and of Louis Philippeaux, Seigneur de la Vaillière. Of later date are those of the Comtesse de Verrue, Beatrix de Choiseul, La Rochefoucald, President Seguier, Turgot, Montausier, Marie Leczinska, and a host of others too numerous to mention.
The German books are few and apparently unimportant, the Italian mostly ecclesiastical, those from the Low Countries mostly school-prizes. There are also two or three Spanish books, all the more welcome because Spanish bindings are so seldom met with in England, and a few fairly good specimens of the bookbinder’s craft without armorial stamps. But the English books are the main feature of the collection.