Sir Frederic Madden and the Battle of the Brass Rubbings C. J.Wright On 1 April 1839 Sir Frederic Madden, Keeper of Manuscripts at the British Museum, received distressing news.1 Mr McDonald, a surgeon at Bristol, wrote to inform him that the previous morning his brother, Lewis Pryse Madden, had, after a brief illness, expired of apoplexy at Clifton aged fifty-six.2 A week later, on Monday the 8th, Lewis was laid to rest in the crypt of Clifton Parish Church. Unlike his two other surviving brothers, Charles and Henry,Sir Frederic was unable to be present at the ceremony as his second wife, Emily,was expecting their first child, a son, Frederick William, who was born the next day. Such a melancholy occurrence would usually only affect the bereaved family but Lewis’s demise was to have unexpected ramifications. It must, after all, be rare for the domestic afflictions of one of the Museum’s Keepers to throw light on the development of its collections.To understand why it should be so in this particular case, it is necessary first to say something about Lewis Madden himself. The history of Sir Frederic’s eldest brother was typical of that of many of his generation. Lewis Pryse Madden had been born at Rochester on 15 October 1782, the second child but eldest son of Captain William John Madden. Like his father before him he joined the Royal Marines, though only rising to the rank of Lieutenant. His memorial tablet3 in Clifton parish church proudly records that he served for almost twenty years in the French Revolutionary Wars in many parts of the globe under, amongst others, Nelson and Sir Home Popham.4 After the defeat of Napoleon, the armed forces were cut back and Madden retired. He had married, first, on 10 March 1811, at Bath, Caroline, daughter of John Marsh of Woodhouse, Gloucestershire. Their two children, Caroline Lucy and Lewis Powell Madden, were born at Bath Easton (on 7 May 1819 and 5 March 1822 respectively). 1 A version of this paper was read at a meeting of the Madden Society at the British Library on 5 September 2002. Most scholarship is a collaborative effort and this article is more a fruit of such collaboration than most. It is a particular pleasure here to acknowledge A. J. Spence. He it was who, in his transcription of Madden’s Journal for 1843, first raised the question as to the fate of Lewis Madden’s brass rubbings which this article seeks to answer. In generously making available extracts from his transcripts of the 1843 Journal he has also provided much of the evidence on which that answer is based. I would also like to express my gratitude to all those others who have so greatly assisted with its preparation: Jean Rankine; Antony Griffiths, Keeper of Prints & Drawings, British Museum; Professor Andrew Prescott; Christopher Date, the British Museum Archivist; Gary Thorn of the British Museum Archives; and John Hopson, the British Library Archivist, to name but a few. 2 Madden’s Journal, 1 April 1839. The Journal [hereafter, MJ] is Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. hist. c. 140-182. A copy is BL, MS. Facs. *1012/1-44. Extracts are printed by permission of Mrs P.Scowen and of the Bodleian Library. 3 By H.Wood of Bristol. 4 MJ, 25 July 1843. 1 eBLJ 2003,Article 1 Sir Frederic Madden and the Battle of the Brass Rubbings Caroline died at Clifton on 14 July 1835 but was buried at Bath Easton. Lewis remained a widower for under a year. On 5 May 1836, at St Martin’s in the Fields, London, he married his first cousin Margaret Jordan, the widow of the Reverend Wilfrid Carter. Though the second Mrs Madden lived until 1861, this union was cut short by his own death just under three years later.5 How Lewis Madden occupied himself during his retirement emerges from his brother’s journal.Thus, when Sir Frederic called at Clifton during his honeymoon tour of the west of England in the late autumn of 1837, Lewis was away in Berkshire shooting on the estate of his friend,William Congreve of Aldermaston House.6 However, he also shared some of the antiquarian interests that made his younger brother famous. On 1 July 1843 Lewis’s widow told Sir Frederic that Evans, the printseller, had failed to sell the rubbings of monumental brasses at Bristol and elsewhere which Lewis had made, possibly because they were valued at a guinea each, which Madden thought too high. Evans had advised her to send them to John Nichols of Parliament St,‘that stingy hound’, as Madden referred to him. ‘These rubbings are 25 in number, most of them the size of life, beautifully executed, and mounted on tinted paper. The expenses of the paper, heel-ball, journeys. etc. cost Lewis above 6£. 6s.0d. [i.e. six guineas] yet this miserable screw Nichols, in a letter to Mrs. M. while admitting the beauty of the rubbings, and the labor of execution, has had the meanness to offer two guineas for the whole! I was excessively indignant, & told Mrs. M. to take them out of Nichols’s hand immediately.’7 A few days later she called at the Museum with a couple of the rubbings to show him.8 He had already suggested to her that they might well find a home in the Museum and he spoke twice about it to Henry Josi, the Keeper of Prints & Drawings.9 Madden had a low opinion of Josi - ‘I never thought him a gentleman’ - and was horrified to discover after his death in 1845 that as well as a being a former printseller he had also once kept a ham and beef shop.10 On the question of the rubbings, however, Josi proved obliging - even Madden conceded he was ‘genial’ and ‘inoffensive’11 - agreeing to pay the asking price of seven guineas. Though not among the pioneers of brass-rubbing, Lewis Pryse Madden belonged to the growing band of enthusiasts for this new pursuit. Whereas in France monumental brasses had been systematically destroyed at the Revolution, in England a significant number had survived the ravages of the Reformation12 and formed a major resource for the antiquary. Scattered illustrations of brasses can be found in the early numbers of the Gentleman’s Magazine.The need for a more accurate means of recording them than by drawing them 5 The biographical information in this paragraph is based, with their kind permission, on two printed tables in the possession of Mr and Mrs R. Scowen: Pedigree of the Madden Family,As entered in the Office Books of the College of Arms at Dublin and in London in the year 1839, with later additions and corrections, single sheet (aft. 1873), and Schedule of the descendants of William Carter, of Guildford, and Elizabeth, his wife, single sheet (aft. 1873). 6 MJ, 6 Oct. 1837. There is a small illustration of Aldermaston House in Peacock’s Polite Repository or Pocket Companion [for 1820] (London, 1819?), at the beginning of March. 7 MJ, 1 July 1843. 8 MJ, 5 July 1843. 9 MJ, 6, 11 July 43. Prints & Drawings had been established as a separate department in 1836, though there had been a Keeper of Prints since the beginning of the century; see Edward Miller, That Noble Cabinet, A History of the British Museum (London, 1973), p. 294. 10 MJ, 15 Mar. 1845; cited by Miller, p. 294. On the vexed question of whether a post at the Museum was a proper occupation for a gentleman, see A.W.Franks,‘The Apology of my Life’, in Marjorie Caygill and John Cherry (eds.), A.W.Franks: nineteenth-century collecting and the British Museum (London, 1997), p. 319. 11 MJ, 15 Mar. 1845. 12 Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (New Haven and London, 1992), pp. 332-4, 494-5. 2 eBLJ 2003,Article 1 Sir Frederic Madden and the Battle of the Brass Rubbings freehand is graphically demonstrated by the grotesquely inadequate sketches of the brasses of John Cosowarthe and Sir John Arundell of Trerice at Colan and Stratton in Cornwall in ‘Imagines seu Figuræ...’,two volumes (Stowe MSS. 1023, 1024) compiled for the herald John Anstis and afterwards owned by Thomas Astle.13 The scholarly study of brasses is usually traced back to the antiquary Richard Gough,14 whose Sepulchral monuments in Great Britain applied to illustrate the history of families, manners, habits, and arts, at the different periods from the Norman Conquest to the seventeenth century was published in two volumes in 1786 and 1796. Even then, it took a little while for the standard method of rubbing with a heelball, a mixture of hard wax and lampblack originally used by shoemakers, to be accepted. Craven Ord,‘my friend and fellow labourer’, whose ‘indefatigable assiduity’ Gough was happy to acknowledge,15 for the most part inked the brasses themselves, a practice which not only produced ‘reversed’ images but had potential for damaging the artefact and its surroundings.16 The Camden Society’s Illustrations of the Monumental Brasses of Great Britain did not begin appearing until the year after Lewis Madden’s death.17 C. R. Manning’s A List of the monumental brasses remaining in England. Arranged according to counties dates from 1846.The first edition of Herbert Haines’s A Manual of Monumental Brasses was only published in 1848.18 In some ways Lewis Madden seems atypical of the brass enthusiasts of the period, many of whom developed or extended their interest in the subject while undergraduates at the two ancient universities.19 Such evidence as there is suggests that it may have been an activity of his later years.