Alexander Meyrick Broadley

CHAPTER IV
SOME FAMOUS AUTOGRAPH "FINDS"

Personal reminiscences and experiences

No pursuit is more exciting than that of Autographs.—The Archivist, 1888.

If autograph collecting is, as Mr. Joline defines it, "one of the gentlest of emotions," it certainly gives its votaries occasional moments of harmless excitement. Many of my readers will doubtless remember the faded handwriting on the battledores of our childhood, which, it may be presumed, represented the periodical clearings-out of lawyers' offices; but it requires a considerable stretch of the imagination to credit the presence of a portion of one of the copies of the Magna Charta on a drum-head, although the anecdote finds its place in all autograph handbooks. Ample evidence, however, exists of the strong natural affinity which once existed between ancient documents and the callings of the grocer and the fishmonger, but the use for old paper in this connection has almost entirely gone out of fashion, and the greater part of the discarded MSS. go straight to the pulp-mills for the purposes of reconversion. I will not attempt to disguise my envy of the pleasurable sensations Dr. Raffles must have experienced when he picked up the original account of the expenses incurred at the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, duly attested by Burleigh, for eighteenpence at a book-stall on Holborn Hill. Almost equally lucky was the discoverer, on a printing-house file at Wrexham, of the MS. of Bishop Heber's famous missionary hymn, which not very long ago fetched forty guineas at Sotheby's; and still more so the traveller who reclaimed the whole of the forty years' correspondence between James Boswell and the Rev. W. J. Temple from the proprietor of a Boulogne fish-shop.

As the value of autographs becomes more and more widely known, and the search for them becomes keener, chances of important "finds" become rarer, but the possibilities of this kind of treasure-trove are by no means exhausted. English MSS. of great interest and value continually come to light abroad. Letters of the early Reformers often turn up in Holland. Hooper, Bishop of Gloucester, sent the whole of his MSS. to his friend Bullinger, and as yet only a single letter of Tyndall has ever come to light. Others, in all human probability, are hidden away in the bahuts and presses of the Low Countries, where letters of the Duke of Marlborough are not unfrequently offered for sale. Fine Stuart autographs constantly turn up both in Germany and Rome. It was in the Eternal City that the priceless MSS. of Cardinal York were offered for sale at the modest price of £20. The English collector cannot too carefully examine the catalogues regularly issued by foreign dealers. I have already alluded to my discovery of the marriage settlement of Pamela FitzGerald and the sixteenth-century deed relating to a French commission for the colonisation of Canada. It was in a Paris price-list that I came across the following extraordinary letter of Sir Humphry Davy on the subject of his quarrel with George Stephenson:—

Sir Humphry Davy to John Buddle, Esq., Wallsend, Newcastle.

London, February 8, 1817.

Dear Sir,—Newman appears dilatory and has not yet made the apparatus to my mind; but I hope soon to send it you and to give you your new right. I hope no one will try expts with platinum in explosive atmospheres till my paper is published for if fine wire is used and suffered to hang out of the lamp so as to ignite to whiteness in the external air explosion will follow; but by the most simple precaution security is absolute. Stevenson's Pamphlet has proved to the satisfaction of every person who has looked at it in London, that he endeavoured to steal from what he had heard of my researches, safety tubes and apertures: no one could have established his piracy so effectively as himself.

It is stated in one of these malignant advertisements which are below my contempt that I was in the coal district in the end of September 1815. Whereas I left it two days after I saw you at Wallsend which I think was the 23rd or 24th of August and went to Bishop Auckland where I stayed only three days and I spent the greater part of the month of September with Lord Harewood and was in London working in my Laboratory early in October and had discovered several apertures and tubes in the middle of last month whilst Mr. Stevenson's absurd idea of admitting Hydrogen in undetached portions by a slider was fermenting in his mind. I certainly never thought of employing capilliary [sic] tubes. My tubes were merely safe tubes for I knew perfectly well and have proved by expts that no lamp could be fed on air through real capilliary tubes. To make a lamp that will burn on three capilliary tubes is as impossible as to make it burn in a closed decanter. Stevenson's capilliary tubes are evidently stolen from what Mr. Hodgson communicated early in November of my small safe tubes and made capilliary to suit Mr. Brandlings marvellous discovery that wire gauze is the extremity of capilliary tubes.

I am my dear Sir,
Very sincerely yours,
H. Davy.

A specimen of an advertisement suited to Mr. W. Brandling.

Aladdin should sign his name Assassin for he endeavours to stab in the dark. An assassin is a proper associate for a private purloiner. One may attempt to murder while the other carries off the plunder. Mr. W. J. Brandling must be ashamed of such friends as Aladdin and Fair play, at least he cannot wish to be seen in public with them even though he should love them as dearly as himself.

Truth.

One suited to Stevenson.

Mr. George Stevenson has changed his note from capilliary tubes to small tubes. No one can doubt that he pilfered these from Mr. Hodgson's communication of Sir H. Davy's discoveries. His original principle to admit Hydrogen in small detached portions (detached by a slider) is now kept out of sight. A man who in the face of the whole world and in open day light steals the safety trimmer and a safe top in Killingworth Colliery and in the dark may endeavour to steal safety apertures and tubes. But does he now know what is a safe aperture? Let those people who use his lamp, his capilliary tube lamp, look to themselves.

Vindex.

It is fit that great ingratitude and little malevolence should be united in the same cause, fortunately in this case they are associated with great ignorance.

From the same source came the correspondence between Lord Brougham and his friend Arago, in the course of which the ex-Chancellor of Great Britain proposed to abandon his own nationality, and, if elected, take his seat in the French Assembly.

There is scarcely a country house or muniment-room in England which may not afford a happy hunting-ground to the collector. It is only quite lately missing originals of the Paston Letters (lost ever since 1789) were recovered in the library of the descendants of Pitt's friend and literary executor, Bishop Pretyman-Tomline. Although Moore, Murray, and Hobhouse burned one copy of Byron's MS. autobiography in 1824, a duplicate is supposed to be in existence, but its present whereabouts is unknown. In a quiet corner of the Harcourt Library at Nuneham, Whitelock's MS. was found quite unexpectedly, and Burckhardt's journal of the Euphrates Expedition of 1811, and the MSS. of William Oldys are still missing. A bundle of genuine Keats letters was disinterred at Melbourne, and the letters of the Rev. George Crabbe to Miss Elizabeth Charter, now in my possession, sojourned for many years in the Antipodes.

Within the last half-century letters of Addison, Prior, and Mordaunt Earl of Peterborough, and other MSS. of great value, were saved from imminent destruction in a manor house, near Llangollen.

It was only seventy years ago that a dealer in Hungerford Market, named Jay, purchased at £7 a ton a large accumulation of "waste-paper" from the Somerset House authorities. By the merest accident it transpired that amongst the MSS. thus unceremoniously treated were Exchequer Office Accounts of the reign of Henry VII., Secret Service Accounts signed by Eleanor Gwynne, and Wardrobe Accounts of Queen Elizabeth. Several bundles of parchments were sold by Jay to a Fleet Street confectioner, and turned into jelly, before any suspicion arose as to their possible value or importance. It was seventeen years later than this, in 1857, that three hundred tons of papers, including the records of the Indian Navy, went from the old India House to the paper-mill. Comparatively few of the Jay MSS. were recovered, for three tons of paper which remained untouched were accidentally burned.

There is no more picturesque incident in the annals of literary discovery than Sir H. Maxwell Lyle's account of his "find" in a loft at Belvoir, the clue to which was afforded by a faded label on a rusty key. "The disturbance of the surface," we are told, "caused a horrible stench, and it soon became evident that the loft had been tenanted by rats, who had done lasting damage to valuable MSS. by gnawing and staining them. Some documents had been reduced to powder, others had lost their dates or their signatures. The entire centre of a long letter in the hand of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, had entirely disappeared. Those that remained were of a very varied character. A deed of the time of Henry II. was found among some granary accounts of the eighteenth century, and gossiping letters of the Court of Elizabeth among modern vouchers. Letters to Henry Vernon of Haddon from the Duke of Clarence, the Earl of Warwick, and Kings Edward IV., Richard III., and Henry VII., written on paper and folded very small, lay hidden between large leases engrossed on thick parchment."

The loft at Belvoir is certainly not the only place in the United Kingdom where autographic treasure-trove lies hid, and no opportunity should be missed of turning over collections of MSS., when the occasion presents itself. Some five years ago an entry in one of the catalogues of Mr. B. Dobell, of 77, Charing Cross Road, led me to become the possessor of the holograph project for the Defence of England drawn up in 1803-5 by General Dumouriez, on behalf of the last Pitt Administration. The MS. covers nearly four hundred pages, and is carefully bound in white vellum. Every page of it is in Dumouriez's handwriting. From first to last the work done by Dumouriez cost the Government quite £20,000. Only fragments of the scheme exist in the archives of the War Office. This book contains the project in its entirety. It cost me twenty-seven shillings, and formed the basis of a book written in collaboration with Dr. Holland Rose.[20] I have certainly been fortunate in acquiring a great many unknown documents relating to Napoleon and the Napoleonic wars. While rummaging amongst the miscellaneous papers in the possession of Mr. George Mackey, the well-known Birmingham antiquary, I lighted on the whole correspondence between Lord Cawdor and the Duke of Portland relating to the landing in February, 1797, of the French "Black Legion" under Tate at Fishguard, then an almost entirely unknown Welsh fishing village, and now transformed by the Great Western Railway into an important port-of-call. By the kind permission of Mr. J. C. Inglis, General Manager of the G.W.R., a reproduction is now given of the important Cawdor letter first published in the Company's travel-books, "The Country of Castles." The unexpected recovery of these MSS. enabled me to give an exhaustive account of the romantic occurrence with which they deal in "Napoleon and the Invasion of England."[21]

But these were not the only discoveries I made in Mr. Mackey's autographic store. I came upon a number of the original drafts of unpublished patriotic songs by Charles Dibdin, including three in honour of Trafalgar, of which the following is a specimen:—

For some unaccountable reason the commonplace book of the unofficial laureate of the Navy had drifted to Birmingham. It was found by me in the same bin of literary odds and ends as the Cawdor dispatches, which obviously ought to have been in the Home Office or the Record Office. At the same time and place I lighted on the letters of Colonel Digby, the "Mr. Fairly," of Fanny Burney's Journal, to the beautiful sisters Margaret and Isabella Gunning, the first of whom he afterwards married, thereby (if the Court gossip of the day may be trusted) sorely disappointing the literary Assistant-Keeper of the Royal Robes.

It was from Mr. Dobell that I obtained another of the MSS. in my collection which I specially prize—I allude to the holograph copy of Mrs. Robinson's "Memoirs," written nearly entirely on the covering sheets of old letters upon which one reads the signatures of such important and fashionable personages as the Duke of Clarence, Duchesses of Ancaster and Dorset, the Earl of Jersey, the Marquis of Lothian, the Duke of Grafton, and so forth. It is also curious to trace the frequent flittings of the unfortunate "Perdita," the early love of the Prince described in bitter irony as "the first gentleman in Europe." From Berkeley Square she moves to Clarges Street, and thence in rapid succession to Piccadilly, Curzon Street, St. James's Place, Hill Street, Stanhope Street, and South Audley Street. Now she is at the Ship Inn at Brighton; now at the HÔtel de Russie and the HÔtel de Chartres at Paris; now at No. 10, North Parade, Bath. One or two letters seem to have been addressed to Englefield Cottage, where she died. On an ivy-grown tomb in Old Windsor churchyard one can still decipher Samuel Pratt's lines beginning:—

From this MS. the "Story of Perdita and Florizel" may some day be re-written or re-edited.

By the kindness of Dr. Scott I added to my collection a genuine letter of great Shakespearean interest, for it is addressed to Edward Alleyn, the Founder of Dulwich College, by William Wilson, one of the actors in Shakespeare's troop at the Fortune Theatre. It runs as follows:—

From the registers of St. Saviour's, Southwark, it is clear that Wilson's marriage took place there on Sunday, November 2, 1617, about eighteen months after Shakespeare's death. Dowton, like Farren, is an hereditary theatrical name, and the Wilson letter reveals another actor Dowton, probably an ancestor of the Dowtons of a later time. Dr. Wallace, the erudite discoverer of the new Shakespeare document at the Record Office, writes me that he considers the letter of William Wilson an excellent specimen of the epistolary style of Shakespeare's time, and of singular interest to Shakespearean students.

Some of my most interesting "finds" are now placed in my Napoleonic collection, which I have almost doubled in extent since the publication of "Collectanea Napoleonica."[23] For £5 I obtained, some five years ago at Sotheby's, the letter of 24 4to pages in which Sir Stamford Raffles describes his visit to St. Helena and his interview with Napoleon. As I received a very substantial sum for permission to reproduce a portion of it in a daily paper, this interesting and valuable MS. cost me nothing. At the Bunbury sale a great many letters of historical importance fetched a comparatively low price. It was at this sale that Mr. Frank Sabin bought the second and more lengthy letter from George Crabbe to Edmund Burke now in my possession. It was at the Bunbury "dispersal" that the late Mr. Frederick Barker bought for me the extraordinary official letter and holograph proclamation to the VendÉans penned by Louis Larochejaquelein on June 2, 1815, an hour or two before his death. These documents would certainly have fetched five times the price I paid for them in Paris, where I had to pay £10 for a letter of his more famous brother Henry, killed in 1794. I also purchased at the Bunbury sale two long letters of C. J. Fox to his uncle, General Fox, and a confidential letter of Earl Bathurst giving Bunbury his opinion of Gourgaud, and enclosing four sheets of a private letter from Sir Hudson Lowe. The companionship of autographs is curious. In a letter of the Marquis Montchenu, the garrulous French Commissioner at St. Helena, I found an autograph of Sir Hudson Lowe, written in 1780 at the London Inn, Exeter, when he was a boy-ensign in the Devon Militia! It was Montchenu who caused a sensation at the Courts of the Allied Powers by declaring that Lowe was about to make Napoleon the godfather of his son, who in 1857 was one of the garrison in the Lucknow Residence. In June, 1906, M. NoËl Charavay bought for me at the Dablin sale a number of Napoleonic rariora, amongst them the Longwood Household Expenses Book kept by Pierron, the maÎtre d'hÔtel, between March, 1818, and April 30, 1821. The entries are always countersigned by Montholon, and in many cases are controlled by Napoleon, who frequently made calculations as to the relative value of pounds and shillings in francs. All these papers will, doubtless, be useful to some one who desires to say the last word on the Last Phase, and I am very grateful to Mr. Frank Sabin, who procured for me the original copy of the elaborately-bound "Last Reign of Napoleon," which Mr. J. C. Hobhouse, afterwards Lord Broughton, sent out to Sir Hudson Lowe for presentation to Napoleon, but which was never given to him. On the flyleaf the author copied out a suggestive quotation from Tacitus. The romance of these volumes belongs rather to the subject of extra-illustration, which I hope to deal with in a future work. I have already pointed out the utility of this interesting pursuit for the proper preservation of valuable autographs. In America, where so many collectors believe that "the political is ephemeral and the literary eternal," thousands of autographs are inserted in as many books, to which the special charm and value of "association" is thus given. I need not say that I have placed a characteristic John Cam Hobhouse letter in the second volume of this unique copy of "The Last Reign of Napoleon." Some two years since I obtained through Messrs. Maggs, of 109, Strand, two very interesting MSS. connected with the Irish Rebellion of 1798. One of these is the Camolin Cavalry Detail Book, May 25-October 8, 1798, and the other is made up of a collection of the letters written between 1796 and 1815 by Arthur, Earl of Mount Norris, a Royalist leader. With the new light obtained from them and the MS. journal of a lady who was an eye-witness of the occurrences she describes, Mr. H. F. B. Wheeler and the writer have endeavoured to again deal with the story of the "War in Wexford." I have by no means completed my list of "finds." I trust, however, I have said enough to illustrate the utility of autograph-hunting and the pleasurable excitement derivable from the unexpected running to earth of some long-since forgotten letter or document which is not only of money value, but can help to throw new light either on the life of the writer, or the far-off times in which it was written.