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In February 2011 the newly appointed librarian was contacted by a solicitor who was dealing with the estate of an individual who had once been associated with the library. The solicitor had been given a sealed letter which contained a full confession of the theft and detailed instructions about where the books were to be found. The librarian and a colleague were dispatched to a house, where they discovered a vast quantity of books hidden in the attic, along with three drawers of cards from the old catalogue. These were removed to Lambeth and a preliminary assessment begun. It soon emerged that not just 60 books had been abstracted but approximately 1,400 individual items, many of them fine volumes with coloured engravings from the libraries of the Elizabethan and Jacobean archbishops John Whitgift, Richard Bancroft and George Abbot. What had been stolen was a treasure trove of books of the finest quality and of immense historical interest.
Although they were stored in relatively stable conditions, many of the books had been badly mutilated in an attempt to remove indications of former ownership: armorial bindings, shelfmarks, ownership inscriptions and library stamps all excised. As a result, work has now begun on conservation and cataloguing. It will be a challenging task. A comparison of the recovered books with the old index cards, moreover, shows that some items are still missing, including the magnificently illustrated Mariners Mirror (1588), containing 45 engraved maps of the sea-coasts of Europe.
What then has come back? And what does it tell us about this gem of a library,nestled inconspicuously behind the gate to the Lollards Tower at the Archbishop’s principal residence across the river from the Houses of Parliament?
The 16th century was the great age of exploration, and witnessed the scramble among European powers to chart and colonise distant lands. Elizabeth herself was deeply interested in these discoveries and patronised English explorers, such as Martin Frobisher, who was determined to find a Northwest Passage to the Orient. One of her most trusted advisors was Archbishop Whitgift — she called him her ‘little black husband’ — and he would have been well able to discuss exotic distant lands with her, where men’s ‘heads do grow beneath their shoulders’.
As the returned books remind us, his collection of cosmographical volumes was breathtakingly wide-ranging, including illustrated accounts of Russia, Persia, the Near East, China, India, Africa and North and South America, as well as writings by the great map-makers of the period, Mercator and Ortelius. Descriptions of the Holy Land would have particularly appealed to the archbishop, and his copy, now retrieved, of the first edition of Christiian Cruys’s Theatrum terrae sanctae (1590) contains the most dramatic and important contemporary plan of Jerusalem, as well as the first illustrated fixing of the Stations of the Cross.
The skills acquired by Elizabeth’s explorers had values nearer to home as well. Two years after Sir Francis Drake returned from a raiding expedition against Spanish settlements in the Caribbean the Armada set sail with some 138 ships, planning to overthrow the queen and place her brother-in-law Philip II on the throne. Even with lesser forces the English Navy showed itself prepared to retaliate with a fleet commanded by Charles, Baron Howard of Effingham, and Drake as Vice-Admiral. After a number of engagements, the Spanish suffered a crushing defeat at the Battle of Gravelines on 13 July 1588 and the remaining ships began their retreat, approximately 67 limping into Spanish ports in late September.
The whole episode had considerable propaganda value, and this was soon exploited, most dramatically in the beautiful Expeditionis Hispanorum in Angliam vera descriptio, Anno Do MDLXXXVIII (1590). Based on Howard’s version of events, the brief text was composed by the Italian calligrapher and writer Petruccio Ubaldini, long resident in England. To illustrate the action 11 charts were produced by Robert Adams, surveyor of the queen’s buildings, and engraved by Augustine Ryther, instrument maker and engraver. Although much defaced, the retrieved Lambeth copy still retains the charts, including that illustrating the retreat of the Armada to Spain.
Great strides were also made in medicine during Elizabeth’s reign, and many finely illuminated books on surgery were published. When the Folger Library in Washington purchased a copy of The French Chirurgerye in 1959 the curators crowingly observed that only seven copies were known to survive. The lost Lambeth copy has now resurfaced; it is one of a number of medical books that were stolen for their engravings.
The power of print as a weapon of propaganda began to be fully exploited in the second half of the 16th century. Temporary printing presses were set up in secluded Catholic houses: these could be dismantled and hidden before the authorities came snooping. Ecclesiastical agents were quick to destroy the polemical texts that issued from these presses, but they often retained a copy for the record. Lambeth Palace Library thus possesses one of the largest collections of recusant materials anywhere, often holding unique copies of highly volatile texts.
On the other side, Lambeth became the repository for books justifying the stern measures against the Catholic party, many acquired by Richard Bancroft when he was bishop of London. One composite volume he had put together and bound with his own arms —these have been excised by the thief — consists of eight separate works including the highly polemical A defence of the honorable sentence and execution of the Queene of Scots, published just days after Mary’s beheading on 8 February 1587, and the True report of the Apprehension, Examination, Arraignment, Tryall, Conviction, and Condemnation of Robert Drewrie, the seminary priest who was executed in 1607 after refusing to sign the oath of allegiance imposed on Catholics in the wake of the Guy Fawkes affair.
Not all the most beautiful of the recovered books derive from Whitgift or Bancroft. Lambeth Palace Library is the repository for the papers of George Carew, earl of Totnes, who was the Lord president of Munster from 1600 to 1604 and who succeeded in putting down the Irish rebellion after the earlier failures of Robert Devereux, earl of Essex. A key source for the period, these documents were consulted in Carew’s lifetime by the antiquary Sir Thomas Stafford for the compilation of his graphic Pacata Hibernia: Ireland appeased and reduced, or, An historie of the late warres of Ireland, especially within the province of Mounster (1633). Included were 17 maps and plans, some of these providing the earliest surviving views of Irish towns. Hand-coloured in the Lambeth copy, they are detailed as well as exquisitely drawn and it is particularly fortunate that they were not sold individually when the volume was broken up.
As in so many books of the period, however, the magnificence of production and illustration that we admire on aesthetic grounds was meant by contemporaries to serve a different purpose: it emphasised the power of the controlling regimes and told the story as it was put forward by the Anglo-Irish rather than the defeated Gaelic chieftains.
In his will Bancroft stated that his greatest desire was that his library be passed intact to the archbishops of Canterbury ‘forever’; and his successor, George Abbot, mandated that each new archbishop in perpetuity be responsible for the value of any book lost or stolen. If in 1975 Archbishop Donald Coggan had been informed about this stipulation, he might well have had cause for alarm. And if the unsettled debt were to pass from archbishop to archbishop, Rowan Wlliams could have counted the retrieval of the books as one of the few blessings of his troubled archiepiscopacy. Whatever else, it greatly enriches the already impressive library over which Justin Welby will now preside.
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