The Harleys as Collectors Frances Harris I will try in this contribution to be as single-minded as I can in confining myself to the Harleys and their collecting; that is, as far as possible I will leave out Humfrey Wanley, difficult as that is. He is the subject of Deirdre Jackson’s essay and the documentation of his connection with the Harleian collection is of course copious and authoritative. But he is less reliable about how it began, simply because this was long before his arrival on the scene. Wanley was one of us: scholar, curator, library-keeper, palaeographer; these activities were at the centre of his life. It is a more complex matter to make connections between the Harleys’ collecting and the rest of their lives, though the connections certainly do exist. In suggesting some of them, I will deal mostly, though not exclusively, with the manuscripts, and I shall certainly focus more closely on Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford (fig. 1), and his predecessors than on his son Edward, the 2nd Earl. Edward Harley was an attractive figure in many ways; one of James Lees-Milnes’s Augustan ‘Earls of Creation’: a generous patron and friend whose collecting gradually expanded until it took over most of his resources. He is more easily understood than his father. But it was with Robert Harley that it began in earnest and took its initial character, and if he had not begun there is no reason to suppose that his son would have had the energy or resources to have done it for himself. To grasp what there was about the Harleys as a family that led the collection to have the strengths it has, we need to go well back beyond the date usually given for the start of the collection, the early eighteenth century (Wanley’s date, as we shall see), beyond even the first evidence of Robert Harley’s collecting when he was in his twenties, to the time of his father and even his grandparents (fig. 2). Humfrey Wanley’s obsequious references to Robert Harley as ‘my noble Lord of Oxford’, together with the ancient aura of the earldom of Oxford, can obscure the fact that the title was revived for him based on a rather distant family connection, and that his contemporaries did not regard him as at all aristocratic. In fact one of them, obviously a political enemy, bracketed him with Sir Robert Walpole as ‘men of low birth and of no connexions’, who ‘had nothing but their own abilitys and their prince’s favour to support them’. Ability and royal favour were not of course negligible assets or ones to be ashamed of, and the comment about low birth is not justified either. The Harleys were in fact long-established Herefordshire gentry and had played a prominent part in their Marcher community from at least the time of Edward I and possibly earlier.1 They were proud of their family and carefully tended its reputation. ‘The development of a Harley mystique was a quite deliberate process’, as David Hayton puts it in his excellent essay on Robert Harley and the ‘Puritan Heritage in Augustan Politics’, ‘and each successive Harley carried it further forward, idealizing his predecessors and proceeding in turn to his own family beatification’.2 Editor’s note. Selected papers from the conference ‘“Divers Manuscripts both Antient & Curious”: Treasures from the Harley Collection’, held at the British Library, 29-30 June 2009, are published as eBLJ 2011 articles 1-11. The conference organizers are pleased to acknowledge here the generous support given to the conference by the Association for Manuscripts and Archives in Research Collections, the Getty Foundation, M. Moleiro and the Scouloudi Foundation. 1 Clyve Jones, ‘The Harley Family and the Harley Papers’, British Library Journal, xv (1989), pp. 123-4. 2 David Hayton, ‘Robert Harley’s “Middle Way”: the Puritan Heritage in Augustan Politics’, British Library Journal, xv (1989), p. 163. 1 eBLJ 2011, Article 1 The Harleys as Collectors Fig. 1. Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford: after Sir Godfrey Kneller. British Library. Fig. 2. Family tree, showing the parents and grandparents of Robert and Edward Harley, 1st and 2nd Earls of Oxford. 2 eBLJ 2011, Article 1 The Harleys as Collectors Coming forward to the early seventeenth century, we encounter the grandparents of the first Earl of Oxford, Sir Robert Harley and Lady Brilliana Harley. Documents such as the former’s ‘Character of a Puritan’ and the latter’s commonplace digest of her reading clearly illustrate the strong and highly literate puritan convictions that led the Harleys to side with Parliament against their monarch and so separated them from other gentry in their predominantly royalist county in the 1640s.3 Along with this went a powerful sense of public duty and of the close connection between ‘the godly’ and the parliamentary cause. Robert Harley’s grandfather, Sir Robert Harley, died in 1656 and his father, Sir Edward Harley, in 1700. Both were long-lived and long-serving MPs, men of powerful presence amongst their descendants. Because of their longevity the heads of the family in each seventeenth-century generation grew into maturity very much in their fathers’ shadows. This was certainly true of the first Earl of Oxford, who was nearly forty at the time of his father’s death; as David Hayton remarks, ‘it was by establishing himself and to a lesser extent his father as role models for a high-minded patriotism that Sir Edward Harley exerted the strongest and most enduring influence over the public careers of his descendants’.4 Robert Harley, the future earl, was born in 1661, had a nonconformist education in keeping with his parents’ allegiances and was first elected to Parliament after the Revolution of 1688 while still in his twenties. He soon made his mark there, eventually achieving the ultimate testimony of the confidence of his fellow Members: that of being elected Speaker (fig. 3). He came to the front benches in 1704 as secretary of state during the Marlborough- Godolphin administration. From 1708 there followed a three-year period in the wilderness after he made a premature attempt to challenge the alliance between the Whig Junto and the ministry; but he retained the Queen’s favour and returned in 1710 as head of a Tory ministry. Carried forward on a wave of popular sympathy after an assassination attempt in 1711, he was appointed Lord Treasurer (effectively prime minister) and raised to the peerage.5 But high politics at this period were still deeply adversarial and the stakes were very high. While execution might be less of a threat than it had been under Charles I, banishment and imprisonment remained very real ones; both Clarendon and Marlborough paid this price, despite their outstanding services to the later Stuarts. So now did Oxford under George I, impeached and imprisoned in the Tower for two years by the Whigs for his part in the Treaty of Utrecht. This, followed by his gradual decline in health until his death in 1724, meant that his son Edward had to take over as acting head of the family, and this included the management of his book and manuscript collection. All this while it had been quietly and steadily growing, until by George I’s accession it could be justifiably described by Wanley as ‘much the best and most valuable and numerous of any now in England, excepting only that of Sir Robert Cotton’; in 1715 he counts 3,000 manuscript books (many with ‘rich and costly’ illuminations), 13,000 charters, 1000 rolls, as well as copious collections of state records.6 Robert Harley was thus a major political figure with a dramatic and many-faceted career. He left, in addition to his collection, one of the most important family and political archives of the period, of which the main portion is now at the British Library and most of the remainder readily accessible elsewhere.7 It is therefore surprising that there is still no 3 Jacqueline Eales, ‘Sir Robert Harley, K. B. (1579-1656) and the “Character of a Puritan”’, British Library Journal, xv (1989), pp. 143-57; Eales, Puritans and Roundheads: The Harleys of Brampton Bryan and the Outbreak of the English Civil War (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 4-5, 49, 197-200; ‘Brilliana, Lady Harley’, http://www.let.leidenuniv.nl/hsl_shl/brilliana_harley.htm. 4 Hayton, ‘Robert Harley’s “Middle Way” …’, p. 163. 5 W. A. Speck, ‘Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, xxv (Oxford, 2004), pp. 317-26. 6 H[istorical] M[anuscripts] C[ommission], Portland MSS., vol. v, pp. 515-16. 7 Jones, ‘The Harley Family and the Harley Papers’, pp. 128-33, lists the various groups; note that what was then British Library Loan 29 (the Portland loan) is now Add. MSS. 70001-70523. 3 eBLJ 2011, Article 1 The Harleys as Collectors Fig. 3. ‘The House of Commons in Session’, painting by Peter Tillemans, 1709-14. © Palace of Westminster Collection. 4 eBLJ 2011, Article 1 The Harleys as Collectors satisfactory modern study of him and certainly not one that integrates the rest of his career with his collecting. The great Queen Anne scholar, Geoffrey Holmes, noted in exasperation in a review of one eagerly awaited political biography that it was not until fifteen pages from the end that any mention at all was made of Harley’s having amassed one of the greatest collections of his day; but he then goes on to cite the several deterrents to addressing any aspect of Harley’s career satisfactorily: the sheer variety and complexity of his activities and their contexts, ‘the labyrinths of diplomacy, the technicalities of public finance and the deep waters of ecclesiastical policy’, as well as Harley’s deep-seated religious beliefs and unexpected but equally genuine interest in scholarship.8 The best studies remain those which stress the importance of his puritan family heritage; if not the traditional puritan perception that parliamentary politics were a war between the godly and the ungodly, still a powerful inherited sense of the public duty of the godly magistrate or official, of which he was the latest family exemplar.