Antiquarian Patronage in the 17th Century: Sir Christopher Hatton’s Library at Kirby Hall

Abstract

Kirby Hall, once the home of the Elizabethan Lord Chancellor, Sir Christopher Hatton (1540–91), was modernized in the 1630s by the 3rd Sir Christopher Hatton (1605–70), later Lord Hatton. Hatton was a significant collector of English and continental music and patronized some of the most important antiquaries of the 17th century, employing Sir William Dugdale as his assistant. At Kirby Hall, Hatton and his associates amassed a major collection of medieval and later manuscripts and undertook ambitious scholarly projects. Providing a cultural hub for the antiquaries throughout the turbulent English Civil War, Hatton deserves recognition as one of the fathers of early modern scholarship.

The location of the antiquaries scholarly activity at the house has not previously been established; Kirby Hall is now partly ruined and much of its interior is missing. But there is a possibility that amongst his architectural works of the 1630s Hatton commissioned a handsome new library at Kirby, designed in emulation of the elder antiquary, Sir Robert Cotton (1571–1631). If this is the case, Kirby Hall had one of the earliest purpose-built country house libraries.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My thanks particularly to Richard Lea for his astute analysis of Kirby Hall’s development and many fascinating discussions; to other colleagues, especially Nick Hill, Brian Kerr, Kathryn Morrison and Richard Hewlings, and my predecessors at English Heritage whose research has been invaluable, Lucy Worsley and Nicola Smith. Special thanks also to Charlotte Brudenell of Deene Park, and to the staff of the Society of Antiquaries library and the Northamptonshire Record Office.

Notes

1 A copy of this painting was sold by Christie’s on 17 July 2006 from the collection at Mostyn Hall. It is in very poor condition and, as shown in the catalogue entry, apparently defaced.

2 The Chancellor Sir Christopher Hatton I’s estate passed first in 1591 to Sir William (Newport) Hatton, his nephew, who died in 1597. On Sir William’s death, it passed to the Lord Chancellor’s cousin, the second Sir Christopher Hatton (c.1581–1619).

3 JA Gotch, The Old Halls and Manor Houses of Northamptonshire, London, 1936, 15–18; GH Chettle, Kirby Hall, Northamptonshire, London, 1947, 6; John Heward and Robert Taylor, The Country Houses of Northamptonshire, Swindon, 1996, 245; Mark Girouard, Elizabethan Architecture, New Haven and London, 179–81; Nicola Stacey and Richard Lea, Kirby Hall, English Heritage guidebooks, 2016.

4 Howard Colvin, Biographical Dictionary of British Architects 1600–1840, New Haven and London, 2008, 991.

5 Jonathan P Wainwright, Musical Patronage in Seventeenth Century England: Christopher First Baron Hatton (1605–1670), Aldershot, 1997, 115–59; D Pinto, ‘The music of the Hattons’, Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle, 23, 1990.

6 Hatton compiled a Psalter of David published in Oxford 1644 [The Psalter of David, Oxford, 1644].

7 W Hamper (ed.), The Life, Diary and Correspondence of Sir William Dugdale, 1827, 185, note.

8 WO Hassall, ‘The books of Sir Christopher Hatton at Holkham’, The Library, 5th series, no. 1, 1950, 1–13, notes confusion between ‘the great Christopher’, the Lord Chancellor, and a ‘later namesake’.

9 Heward and Taylor, op. cit., 159–63.

10 Ibid., 293.

11 Ibid., 64–67.

12 Ibid., 98; alterations at Boughton in this period included barrel-vaulted plaster ceilings, and a fireplace with heraldic overmantel, depicting three generations of the Montagu family tree.

13 Ibid., 133–35; Gervase Jackson-Stops, Country Life, CLXXIX, 30 January 1986, 248–53 and 310–15. My thanks to Richard Hewlings for this reference and his other much appreciated comments.

14 C Lewis and D Stenton, Sir Christopher Hatton’s Book of Seals, Oxford, 1950, xv–lii.

15 William Bray (ed.), Diary and Correspondence of John Evelyn, London, 1901; ‘The Nicholas Papers: correspondence of Sir Edward Nicholas’, Camden Society, 1897, 3–8, 122–23, 280–82, 282–85, all from Hatton in Paris (under the alias of Simeon Smith) to Nicholas.

16 Wainwright, loc. cit.

17 Christopher Dyer and Catherine Richardson (eds), William Dugdale, Historian, 1605–1686 —His Life, his Writings and his County, Woodbridge, 2009, 40–41, 48–49, 56–59; Marion Roberts, Dugdale and Hollar, History Illustrated, Delaware, 2002, 78; Jan Broadway (ed.), No Historie so Meete: Gentry Culture and the Development of Local History in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England, Manchester, 2006, 44–47; David Pearson, ‘The English Private Library in the Seventeenth Century’, The Library, 7th series, XIII, no. 4, December 2012, 379–99.

18 Wainwright, op. cit., 1997, 21, note 109; Lewis and Stenton, op. cit., introduction.

19 London, British Library, (hereafter BL), Add MS 29,571, fo. 3.

20 John Nichols, The Progresses, Processions and Magnificent Festivities of King James I, IV, 1828, 985.

21 Andrew Thrush and John P Ferris (eds), The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1604–1629, Cambridge, 2010; www.historyofparliamentonline.org.

22 Wake, op. cit., 113, citing Deene House, Brudenell MSS C. iv, 21.

23 Sir Edward Montagu (1563–1644) was on bitter terms with Francis Fane of Apethorpe (1580–1628) over office during the 1620s, and with Thomas Brudenell of Deene, 1st Earl of Cardigan (c.1583–1663) over his recusancy (Thrush and Ferris, op. cit.).

24 Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Ware in England, Oxford, 1826, 551.

25 Wake, op. cit., 106–7.

26 Anthony Wagner, Heralds of England: A History of the Office and College of Arms, London, 1967, 167, 185–86.

27 Northamptonshire Record Office, Finch-Hatton papers (hereafter FH), 2977.

28 Hassall, loc. cit.

29 Wake, op. cit., 54.

30 CE Wright, ‘The Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries and the Formation of the Cottonian Library’, in Francis Wormald and CE Wright (eds), The English Library before 1700, London, 1958, 31; CJ Wright (ed), Sir Robert Cotton as Collector: Essays on an Early Stuart Courtier and his Legacy, London, 1997.

31 Edmund, Lord Bishop of London (ed.), English Works of Sir Henry Spelman Kt., published in his life-time: together with his posthumous work, relating to the laws and antiquities of England: and the life of the author, London, 1727.

32 Wagner, op. cit., 242.

33 Ibid., 232.

34 Joan Evans, A History of the Society of Antiquaries, Oxford, 1956, 8, citing British Library (hereafter BL), Cott MS Faustina E. 5, fo. 12. Their petition was unsuccessful.

35 Lewis and Stenton, op, cit., xvi–xvii.

36 W Hamper (ed.), The Life, Diary and Correspondence of Sir William Dugdale, London, 1827, 170; Graham Parry, The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century, Oxford, 1995, 99–100.

37 E Blount (ed.), John Earle, The Microcosmography, or A Piece of the World discovered in Essays and Characters, London, 1628.

38 FH 4218, 4227, 4235; other documents collected by Hatton up to 1635 include FH 58, FH 20, FH 29, FH 45, FH 136, FH 2408.

39 FH 4016, catalogue possibly taken by George Jeffreys, 15 April 1633.

40 Hamper, op. cit., 171; BL, Add MS 28564, fo. 221.

41 Ibid., 12, footnote. 25 June 1635: ‘received the day and year abovesaid, at the hands of Mr Roger Dodsworth and Mr William Dugdale, the some of Forty Shillings, towards the further satisfaction yet I am to receive for the Abstract of the Clause Rolls . . . William Colet [Chief Clerk of the Records at the Tower of London]’. Colet’s scrupulous preservation of the documents at the Tower was especially admired: ‘[Colet] so orderly digested all records, that they were to be found in an instant. He abominated their course, who by water would refresh a record to make it useful for the present, and useless for ever after. He detested, under the pretence of mending it, to practise with a pen many old writing; preserving it in the pure nature thereof’ (Thomas Fuller (d. 1661), quoted in The Life of Dr. John Colet: Dean of St. Paul’s in the Reigns of K. Henry VII. and K. Henry VIII. and Founder of St. Paul’s School ; with an Appendix, Containing Some Account of the Masters and More Eminent Scholars of that Foundation, and Several Original Papers Relating to the Said Life by Samuel Knight, Oxford, 1828, 230).

42 Hamper, op. cit., 176, letter XX.

43 Kevin Sharpe, Sir Robert Cotton 1586–1631, History and Politics in Early Modern England, Oxford, 1979, 28.

44 Evans, op. cit., 13.

45 Ibid., 22.

46 Lewis and Stenton, op. cit., xxiii.

47 This collection was subsequently bound into nine volumes, and is located in the Society of Antiquaries of London (SAL/MS/664/1).Mistakenly understood to be a collection belonging to the herald and antiquary William le Neve, it was (and remains) bound under his name (Sir Anthony Wagner, A Catalogue of English Medieval Rolls of Arms (Aspilogia), 1950, 1).

48 Ibid., xxiii–xxiv.

49 Lewis and Stenton, op. cit., xxv; Hamper, op, cit., 199, 43.

50 Documents in the Hatton family collection at Northamptonshire Record Office include a cartulary for Croxton Abbey (Leicestershire) of about 1270, and a 13th- or 14th-century cartulary for Robert Bray, Rothwell and Rushton.

51 Lewis and Stenton op. cit., xx.

52 Ibid., xxiv; Hamper, op. cit., 203.

53 Lewis and Stenton, op. cit., xxviii.

54 Lewis and Stenton, op. cit.

55 Hamper, op. cit., 14; Lewis and Stenton, op. cit., xxv.

56 55 William Dugdale, The History of St Paul’s Cathedral in London, from its foundation until these times . . ., London 1658, dedication page.

57 William Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum: a history of the abbies and other monasteries, hospitals, frieries, and cathedral and collegiate churches, with their dependencies, in England and Wales : also of all such Scotch, Irish, and French monasteries, as were in any manner connected with religious houses in England, London, 1655; William Dugdale, The Baronage of England, or an Historical Account of the Lives and Most Memorable Actions of Our English Nobility in the Saxon Time, to the Norman Conquest . . . [to] the End of King Henry the Third’s Reign, London, 1675.

58 Wainwright, op. cit., 29, 37–40.

59 Ibid., 82.

60 Ibid., 125.

61 FH 4017; cross-matching this catalogue with Hatton’s known manuscript collections sold in 1671 to the Bodleian Library in Oxford (MSS Hatton) supports the Kirby identification: the catalogue records, for example, Flores Bernardi (MS Hatton 49, 4111); ‘part of John Lidgate’s works in English verse’ (MS Hatton 73, 4119), Gregorius Pastoralls Sax (MS Hatton 20, 4113), Expositio Augustini in Apocalypsin (MS Hatton 30, 4076), Expositio abbatis Smaragdi de regula sancti Benedicti (MS Hatton 40, 4104). The catalogue will be published separately.

62 The History and Antiquities of Northamptonshire. Compiled from the Manuscript Collections of the late learned Antiquity John Bridges, Esq, by the Rev. Peter Whalley, late fellow of St. John’s College, Oxford, Oxford, 1791, II, 315.

63 FH 2977.

64 Assessment of the inventories shows that the Great Parlour in 1619 became the Dining Parlour in 1772.

65 The Graphic, 4 February 1882, 112; Lawrence Bright, survey drawing, 1900, on display at Kirby Hall.

66 FH 2977.

67 Susie West,An Architectural Typology of the Early Modern Country House Library, 1660–1720, 2013, online Open University; James Raven, The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade 1450–1850, New Haven and London, 2007, 196.

68 MS research note at Hardwick Hall.

69 Simon Jervis, ‘The English Country House Library’, in Nicolas Barker (ed.), Treasures from the Libraries of National Trust Country Houses, New York, 1999, 15–16.

70 Margaret Bowker, ‘Historical Survey 1450–1750’, in Dorothy Owen (ed.), A History of Lincoln Minster, Cambridge, 1994, 197; Colvin, op. cit., 1159.

71 David McKitterick (ed.), The Wren Library, Cambridge, 1995.

72 David Pearson, ‘The English private library in the seventeenth century’, The Library, XIII, no. 4, 2012, 379–99.

73 John Newman, ‘Nicholas Stone’s Goldsmith’s Hall: design and practice in the 1630s’, Architectural History, XIV, 1971, 33.

74 WL Spiers (ed.), ‘The notebook and account book of Nicholas Stone’, Walpole Society, VII, 1918–19, 119, 125, 128–29.

75 Colin GC Tite, ‘Lost or stolen or strayed: a survey of manuscripts formerly in the Cotton Library’, British Library Journal, XVIII, 1992, 107–47. Some manuscripts later published by William Dugdale and noted therein as ‘in bibl. Hattoniana’ are likely to have originated in Cotton’s library.

76 Thomas Smith, A Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Cottonian Library, Oxford, 1696; this cataloguing scheme (Cotton Vitellius, Cotton Nero, etc) remains in use for the manuscripts today housed in the British Library.

77 Another admirer of Sir Robert Cotton was Hatton’s antiquarian contemporary Sir Simonds d’Ewes (1602–50), who commissioned a portrait of Sir Robert for Stow Hall, Suffolk, ‘which I have in my librarie as a select and choice monument’ (Andrew Watson, ‘The Library of Sir Simonds D’Ewes’, London, 1966, 46).

78 See, eg, Helen Jacobsen, Luxury and Power: The Material World of the Stuart Diplomat, 1660–1714, Oxford, 2012, 125.

79 Swindon, English Heritage Archives, sale catalogue Kirby Hall 1772.

80 The pre-1674 library at Ham House was also entered from the long gallery (West, op. cit., 11).

81 BL, Add MS 29,571, fos 376, 447; FH 4409, 4397, 4317.

82 Thomas James, The History and Antiquities of Northamptonshire, London, 1864, 74.

83 BL, Add MS 29,571, fos 64–65 and 68.

84 No curtains are mentioned in the 1772 catalogue listing of the chapel; perhaps they were included amongst the seven in the library as all of one original set. Notably, the room labelled ‘Library’ in the 1900 survey drawing of Kirby Hall by Lawrence Bright, has only three windows.

85 FH 4106.

86 FH 4835, 4836, 4837, 4832, 4833, 4834, 4843, 4838, 4840, 4844.

87 FH 4841.

88 London, The National Archives, SP 23/200, p 135.

89 Nicholas Barker and David Quentin, ‘The library of Thomas Tresham and Thomas Brudenell’, The Roxburghe Club, 2006, 146.

90 Oxford, Bodleian Library, Calendar of the Clarendon State Papers, iii 70.

91 Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton Papers, 878.

92 George Warner (ed.), ‘Correspondence of Sir Edward Nicholas, Secretary of State’, Camden Society, I, vi.

93 Nicole Greenspan, ‘Public Scandal, Political Controversy, and Familial Conflict in the Stuart Courts in Exile: The Struggle to Convert the Duke of Gloucester in 1654’, Albion, 2003, 398–427.

94 Hatton’s mother noted on arriving at Kirby in April 1655 that she ‘found all ye poore children well thought stark naked, Charles with only halfe a shirt . . . if I an get any body to lend me a little mony I must be forced to quite cloath them all’ [BL, Add MS 29,571, fo. 23].

95 FH 3098, Dugdale’s witness of a land lease on 26–27 October 1646.

96 Hamper, op. cit., 255.

97 FH 4261.

98 FH 3132.

99 Evelyn noted his visit on 7 June 1659 to see ‘buildings in Hatton Garden designed for a little Towne’ (William Bray (ed.), ‘Diary and Correspondence of John Evelyn’, London, 1901, 231).

100 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS 74, fo. 301, n.d.

101 Writing to her son, the younger Christopher, Lady Hatton noted that Lord Hatton would not give her leave to go to London with him, and that though ‘he is pleased to speak kindly to me and is more cheerful when he was last in the country . . . I shall be as careful not to say anything that might displeasure him’ (BL, Add MS 29,571, fo. 52).

102 FH 2010

103 Lewis and Stenton, op. cit., xxiii (note 1).

104 Elspeth Graham, ‘The Duke of Newcastle’s ‘‘Love [. . .] for Good Horses’’: an exploration of meanings’, in Peter Edwards, Karl AE Enenkel, and Elspeth Graham (eds), The Horse as Cultural Icon: the Real and Symbolic Horse in the Early Modern World, Leiden and Boston, 2012, 37–69.

105 Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion . . ., cit., Oxford, 1701, 205.

106 Wainwright, op. cit., 1.

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Nicola Stacey

Nicola Stacey worked at English Heritage for nine As well as researching Kirby Hall, she completed a has written English Heritage guidebooks to Framlingham Castle and Boscobel House. Since February 2015 she has been Director of the Heritage of London Trust, restoring historic buildings and monuments across London.