The Book Factory of Little Gidding

Abstract

With the death of John Ferrar in 1657 a generation of book-making at Little Gidding ended. When in 1626 the Ferrars completed their move from the bustle of London to the rural quiet of Huntingdonshire the household comprised old Mrs Ferrar, her bachelor son Nicholas, her married son John, his wife and family, and her daughter Susanna and hers. There they inaugurated an activity they considered a mere auxiliary to their main aim of dedicating their new household to God’s service.¹ They sought to increase the biblical knowledge of the younger members of the family and at the same time to provide the young women with practical skills that would complement more traditional housekeeping arts. What began as one of several inhouse projects of improvement, an early example of self-publishing, inadvertently became by the twentieth century matter of interest to the international antiquarian book trade.

The purpose of this paper is not to discuss in detail the creation of these works, already admirably accomplished,² but to consider works that have previously been studied piecemeal, so that they may be seen not as the disparate creation of four individual Ferrar authors but as a single corpus of material. The provenance of these items in many instances is here recorded more fully than before. In a few cases the record is complete and has long been known to be so, but it more often exists only in part. In these latter instances new information has diminished the gaps in our knowledge. Where these gaps have not been wholly filled, it has sometimes been possible to suggest solutions, and warn about unprofitable dead ends. The provenance of some volumes often coincides with the story of particular families, and where that story is complex, I have—to save others—erred, I fear, on the side of excessive detail. Originating at Little Gidding, the volumes began life together but were later scattered. Of the thirty-eight books to be dis-cussed, thirteen are currently lost; of the twenty-four inspected, only ten reached print.

As occurred with other Gidding projects, such as the reconstruction of Leighton Bromswold church and the education of the children of neighbouring parishes, the fundamental idea was conceived by the bachelor Nicholas (1593–1637), overseen by his elder married brother John (c. 1588– 1657), and implemented not only by John’s children, Nicholas (c. 1620– 1640) and Virginia (c. 1627–1688), but chiefly by their Collett cousins. Initially Nicholas had in mind the education of his Collett nieces, the eldest of whom, Mary (c. 1600–1680), a mere seven years younger than himself, was more like a younger sister to him, having been brought up in the same household from an early age by his parents.³ The creation of a Gospel harmony, reassembling into a single narrative the four Gospel stories, would allow Mary and her seven younger sisters to improve their biblical knowledge while developing practical skills. They thus learned to splice gospels, mount the cuttings on folio pages, add printed illustrations, and bind the resulting volumes. The earliest, made for the domestic use of the family, was probably completed by 1630. The following year saw the creation of two more: one as a gift to George Herbert, now lost, the other— without illustrations—perhaps originally intended as a printer’s text. But if Nicholas meant to publish harmonies commercially, as a letter to his cousin Arthur Wodenoth indicates,⁴ he was pipped at the post in 1632 by Johan Hiud with The Storie of Stories: or the Life of Christ, according to the four holy Evangelists; with a harmony of them.

Nevertheless by 1633—the year which saw the publication of yet another harmony, Henry Garthwait’s Monotessaron—making a ‘single tile’ out of the four gospels—word of the nieces’ endeavours was spreading. While staying nearby at Apethorpe on his way to Scotland that year, King Charles learned of the volumes’ existence and sent for one. Having been lent the original, he returned it only in 1635 on being promised his own copy.

Where the king led, others at court or among the local gentry followed. Consequent volumes were either manuscript or printed, and the bindings of these volumes also varied: the least regarded were bound in vellum, green or white, the more important in leather, tooled and sometimes gilded, and the most valued in velvet, green or purple or black.⁵ And it was not only volumes created at Gidding that were so bound; the work encompassed books that had been bought. For example, a Cambridge volume printed by Buck & Daniel in 1637, combining the Book of Common Prayer, the Bible, and Sternhold & Hopkins’s metrical Psalms, was bound in purple velvet, heavily adorned with gilded stamps, and retained as the family Bible.⁶ The outbreak of the civil war in 1642 halted production when the family went abroad, but it was revived on their return. A volume intended for the Prince of Wales and another for the Duke of York had to be completed and in 1649 an attempt was made to take commercial advantage of the publication of Eikon Basilike. Some 250 examples were bought, some already bound and others in sheets that were to be bound at Gidding. Dispatched to Virginia, the West Indies, and Italy, the volumes failed to sell, and not one is known to survive.⁷

Of Little Gidding’s four authors, the eldest and bibliographically least prolific was John’s and Nicholas’s older sister Susanna.⁸ By 1635 she had created a commonplace book; bound at Little Gidding, it echoed topics already explored by the family’s Little Academy. The book passed to Susanna’s daughter Joyce (1615–1692), whose name the volume bears. After Joyce’s death it vanished for almost two centuries. In 1862 it surfaced briefly when Willis and Sotheran offered it for sale, price one guinea. Another century later. In 1956, Philip C. Duschnes sold it to Miss Julia Parkman Wightman who bequeathed it to the Morgan Library where it now has the call number 128838.⁹ The youngest of Little Gidding’s quartet of authors was John’s son Nicholas, to whom Peckard in 1790 devoted a section in his Memoirs of the Life of Mr Nicholas Ferrar.¹⁰ The education at home of young Nicholas was overseen by the uncle for whom he was named, tutors being provided for him ‘both in the sciences and in languages’, in the latter of which he was particularly apt. His first work, undertaken according to Peckard when Nicholas was ‘about fourteen,’¹¹ and thus in his uncle’s lifetime, was a translation of Mynsinger’s book of Occasional Devotions.¹² In his short life—he died in his twenty-first year—he concentrated, after his uncle’s death in 1637, on the production of biblical Harmonies, planning to add diversity to them by the employment of multiple languages.

John Ferrar’s writings, mostly from the last decade of his life, chiefly concerned the colony in Virginia. Accounts of them have already been published and need not be repeated.¹³ In addition Ferrar in 1655, according to Francis Peck,¹⁴ in his own hand wrote a seventy-six-page memoir of his brother Nicholas, intended as the basis for a more formal biography,¹⁵ a task undertaken in the 1670s by Francis Turner, at that time master of St Johns College, Cambridge, and later bishop of Ely. Turner had finished the biography by 1679, but it failed to reach print. With the Popish Plot exciting public opinion, it was no time to publish the biography of someone who could be smeared as a papist. Fortunately, Turner’s relevant notebook survives among the Rawlinson manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, and was at length brought to public notice in 1996.¹⁶

A second attempt was made in the 1730s to derive a Life of Nicholas Ferrar from John’s memoir, and it too all but succeeded. In September 1735, writing to a friend, Francis Peck ‘hoped to complete his task that winter’. Peck’s manuscript, ‘entitled The complete Church of England man exemplified in the holy life of Mr Ferrar, written out fair and prepared for the press’, was among the papers in Huntingdon held by Edward Ferrar (1696–1769), of the younger branch of the family.¹⁷ Lent to the Revd John Jones, vicar of Shephall (Herts), Peck’s manuscript vanished when Jones died unexpectedly in 1770, his death being quickly followed by that of the brother who was his executor.

In the meantime Ferrar’s memoir had also been quarried for information by several other scholars, the latest and best being J. E. B. Mayor in 1855. The obscure history of all these efforts has been admirably disentangled by Muir & White in the introduction to their collated Materials for the Life of Nicholas Ferrar.¹⁸

John Ferrar was in fact the lesser Gidding author. The fame of his brother Nicholas is usually based on his educational and religious programmes at Gidding but underlying those achievements are his personal charm and his persuasive verbal skill in presenting a case, not only in speech but with the pen. If we understand his authorship in the widest sense, we should consider in his earlier public life both the minutes he is said to have written for the Virginia Company of London and his attack on Sir Thomas Smith for his mismanagement of the company, and later at Gidding his private correspondence, his written counsels for himself and other inhabitants of the manor house, his recording of the meetings of the Little Academy, his translations and instructional texts, and his best known achievement, the devising of increasingly complex biblical Harmonies.

Of these many categories of his writing the evidence for the first and second is chiefly to be found in the records of the Virginia Company. In 1622 as the Virginia Company’s Deputy, Nicholas was accused of usurping, in the Secretary ‘s absence, the latter’s duty of composing the minutes. On one occasion he defended himself, saying ‘he did not knowe that it was any essential matter, whither (sic) the Secretary were there or no; whose place [he] himself had many times supplied when there was need or occasion of writinge’. The impersonal style of the minutes makes it hazardous to attribute the authorship of any particular minute beyond a doubt, but Nicholas’s admission suggests he was writing minutes during his less fluently literate brother’s term as Deputy which had ended only on 22 May that year.¹⁹ The evidence for the third and fourth categories is to be found in the Ferrar papers at Magdalene College, Cambridge,²⁰ and for the fifth in the three Story Books now at the British Library and at Clare College, Cambridge.²¹

In 1790 Peckard described²² Nicholas’s recording of the meetings of the Little Academy thus: For the Christmas season of the year 1631, he composed twelve excellent discourses, five suited to the Festivals within the twelve days, and seven to the assumed name and character of The Sisters. These were enlivened by hymns and odes composed by Mr Ferrar, and set to music by the music master of the family, who accompanied the voices with the Viol, or the Lute. That exercise which was to be performed by The Patient, is alone to be excepted. There was not any Poetry or Music at the opening of this as of all the rest: the discourse itself was of a very serious turn, it was much longer than any other, and had not any historical anecdote, or fable interwoven into the body of it. The contrivance was here to exercise that virtue which it was intended to teach.

Upon the whole, these and many other Dialogues, Conversations, Histories, Fables, and Essays, which Nicholas penned for the immediate use of his family, and left behind him in many large volumes, if ever the world should be so happy as to see them, will best shew what he was, a man every way so compleat, that few ages have brought forth his equal; whether we consider his vast memory, his deep judgment, his rare contrivance, or the elegance of stile in the matter, and manner of his compositions.

Peckard is perhaps exaggerating the totality of Nicholas’s composition of the Christmas discourses; Nicholas no doubt suggested the underlying reading that informed them, and he is the most likely scribe of the written record that survives; but Peckard is wholly incorrect when he states, ‘these valuable performances were nearly all destroyed in the general devastation of the place by the Fanatic Zealots of the times soon after the death of Mr Ferrar’.²³ The Story Books survive.

Of Nicholas Ferrar’s three translations, the first (Hygiasticon, in support of temperance) was published thrice before his death in 1637, and the second (The Hundred and Ten considerations of Signior John Valdesso) extolling spiritual experience, in 1638, a year after his death, thus allowing a judgment of his accuracy as a translator; but the loss of the third (Of the instruction of children in the Christian doctrine) by Carbone prevents any estimate of the extent to which his translation diverged from the original.

Like Nicholas’s translation of Carbone, also lost are almost all of his instructional texts, written both to benefit others and to clarify for himself his own thoughts. Fortunately Turner’s notebook, mentioned above, includes extracts that reveal Nicholas’s instructions to the pupils and children at Gidding;²⁴ less happily the companion volume with educational anecdotes, seen by Jones in the 1730s, has disappeared. Jones described it twice over, once styling it, ‘Of the education of children, many stories. Also, wise and witty sayings and actions included in stories. Part ii. Outlandish proverbs &c’, and also as ‘A large book of stories, with outlandish proverbs at the end, englished by Mr. Geo. Herbert: in all, 463 proverbs’.²⁵

The notebook, however, additionally preserves a remnant of Nicholas’s thinking on the rival claims of marriage and the single life, a manuscript that would otherwise be wholly lost to us.²⁶ Neither Peck nor Jones was aware, however, of yet another text, Duties Common to Man and Woman, bound at Little Gidding and (subsequently?) numbered ‘(136)’ on the limp vellum front cover. Its movements are untraced until the nineteenth century, when it was owned by William Hamper FSA (1776–1831), being sold as part of his collections after his death. Offered again on 20 December 1939, it was bought by John Roland Abbey who gave it a boxed cover proclaiming his ownership. A series of Abbey sales beginning in 1965 brought the Duties to market once more. Alan Thomas included it in his Catalogue 17 in 1966, selling it to Dr F. A. Jordan of Cortland, New York. Inherited by his son, it again changed hands in 1999 and remains in the USA.

Of all the volumes created or bound at Little Gidding, the biblical Harmonies are the most famous. Fifteen survive, one of them a fragment, four more have disappeared, and of course there may have been others that have left no record. They are discussed in chronological order.²⁷

The earliest Harmony of which we have record, the volume borrowed, annotated, and returned by the king in 1635, was at the end of the century owned by John Collett (1633–1713); he was the son of Mary Collett’s eldest brother Thomas, with whom she had at first made her home in the late 1650s on being turned out of Gidding. For the next two hundred years the Harmony went unrecorded. Its accidental and happy rediscovery in 1934 was told by C. Leslie Craig in 1947.²⁸ Exhibited at the World’s Fair on Long Island in 1939, it never returned from the United States, and is now at Harvard.²⁹

The two Harmonies that followed it, both completed in 1631, were soon also lost. The volume sent to Bemerton to George Herbert, Nicholas Ferrar’s epistolary friend, passed at once into oblivion. Herbert died in 1633, and by his will left his books to his widow. At her remarriage, to Sir Robert Cooke, of Highnam Court (Glos), the Harmony presumably went with her. It may thus have been destroyed in 1643 when Highnam Court was so damaged in a skirmish between Royalists and Parliamentarians that it had to be rebuilt in the following decade.³⁰

The other 1631 Harmony, in its black morocco binding gilt stamped, also vanished from sight for two centuries before eventually reaching the Bodleian Library at Oxford.³¹ I was tempted at first to believe it George Herbert’s copy that had gone with his widow to Highnam, but a letter in the Ferrar Papers (FP 815) negates such a surmise. Six weeks before Mary Farrer completed her task (she announces on p. 293: ‘THE ENDE / PRAISE TO GOD WITHOVT / ENDE / This Booke was Finished the / Thirde of December An[no] 1631 BY / MARY FARRAR / At Little Gidding’), Arthur Wodenoth had written on 13 October to his cousin Nicholas that he had been at Bemerton with Herbert nine days earlier and ‘after some affectionate [words] one [sic] his part and respective salutations one myne I delivered him first my Cosens booke and lastly y[ou]r letter …’. That the book in question was a Harmony Wodenoth made clear since he ended, ‘His esteem of my Cosens Concordance I will leave to his owne expression w[hi]ch I conceave he will shortly by [h]is owne letter make[.] in the meane time being bound by my promise [I] must make expression of his high prizeing of it & thankfull acknowledged [sic] for it.’

Two centuries later, on 7 April 1844 Alfred Southby Crowdy (1806–1883), a Swindon lawyer, wrote his name on p. 1 of this Harmony;³² and more than sixty years later the volume had a tab inserted alongside it: ‘G. A. Poynder / Antiquarian Bookshop / Next to general post office, / Reading’. The book’s journey from Swindon to Reading is most plausibly explained if it was inherited by Crowdy’s daughter Henrietta. At the time of the 1871 census she was visiting an elderly childless couple in Shinfield on the southern edge of Reading, and in 1891 she inherited their home and wealth. She died on 21 August 1911, and by the end of the year the Harmony had reached Bodley. The replacement Harmony of 1635 created for King Charles passed to the British Museum by gift from George II and is now in the British Library (C.23.e.4).

That same year Little Gidding completed another Harmony, for the Cotton family. Bound in leather, it bears the book stamp of the great antiquary Sir Robert Cotton, of Conington. He had died in 1631 but it seems, according to a note added to the volume in 1888 by Everard Green FSA, that the stamp was still being used by his grandson Sir John, the third baronet who died in 1702.³³ On selling Conington, the senior branch of the family moved to Steeple Gidding where the sixth and last baronet died in 1752. The Harmony passed to his younger daughter Elizabeth then to her son, Thomas Bowdler (1754–1825), the original ‘bowdleriser’. His nephew, the Revd Thomas Bowdler (1782–1856) ‘as a remembrance of his pleasure at finding the daughters of the family encouraged in the good works which Nicholas Ferrar taught his nieces’ gave it to Arthur H. D. Acland (formerly Troyte, 1811–1857). A member of this family, Captain J. E. Acland-Troyte, in 1888 first roused bibliographic interest in the Harmonies by a communication to the Society of Antiquaries, in which he identified ten of them.³⁴ The Acland-Troyte volume remained with the family until it was sold by Sotheby’s in 1997. Bought by the Cotsen family, it is now in the Cotsen Children’s Library at Princeton, New Jersey.

The last two Harmonies certainly created in Nicholas Ferrar’s lifetime, both dated 1637, are narratives derived from Kings and Chronicles and were styled The Acts of the Israelites. The draft volume remained with the family, and passed with the family papers from John (d. 1657) and his son John (d. 1719/20) to the latter’s youngest son Edward (d. 1731) and so to his son Edward (d. 1768). He left them to his son-in-law Peter Peckard, subsequently the master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, who at his death in 1797 left them to the college, where the draft now is.

The king’s copy remained in the royal library until George II passed it with other volumes to the British Museum (BL, MS Royal App. 65). A third volume is known to us only because of a passing reference to it.³⁵ In writing to Isaac Basire in 1641, John Ferrar told how ‘My lord Wharton, upon the sight of the King’s-Concordance, desired to have one of an inferior kind and sort; for the king’s stands us in above £100; but my lord Wharton’s cost him but £37’.³⁶ (Similarly vanished, if indeed it ever existed, is a Harmony said to have been made for Thomas Jackson, the Arminian head of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and an acquaintance of Nicholas Ferrar’s. Relying on a statement by J. E. Acland-Troyte,³⁷ Joyce Ransome referred in 2005 to its possible existence but, finding no confirmatory evidence beyond an unsupported statement by Peckard, in 2011 omitted the claim from her biography of Nicholas Ferrar.³⁸

A third, undated narrative Harmony, the Acts of the Apostles and Apocalypse, should almost certainly be assigned to 1637. It was seen by a visitor to the royal apartments in 1638,³⁹ and bears an identical ‘Museum Britannicum’ stamp to that on The Acts of the Israelites, being another item in the gift made by George II (BL, C.23.e.3).

No later than these volumes is an undated Gospel Harmony. Bound at Little Gidding in stained vellum, stamped, and probably Mary Collett’s personal copy, it bears the bookplate of John Collett.⁴⁰ Surviving all three of his sons, Collett at his death in 1713 left the volume to his schoolmistress cousin Elizabeth.⁴¹ On her death in August 1715 she left the Harmony to another cousin Dr John Mapletoft (1631–1721).⁴² On receiving the volume, in January 1715/16 Dr John wrote on the front page, ‘This was the Book of my Honoured Aunt Mrs Mary Collet Compiled at Little Gidding by the Direction of her Unkle Mr Nicholas Farrar: & Bound, I believe, by herselfe’. He further wrote, ‘I give it to my son … And desire that it may be preserved in my family as long as maybe’. It is the volume now in the British Library, having passed to the British Museum in 1894 (C.23.e.2), as will be described below.

Many of the books created at Gidding came one way or another into Dr John’s hands. He had been brought up there since the age of four, and acknowledged the influence of his ‘much honored’ aunt, Mary Collett, ‘who took care of me and my brother Peter and my sister Mary after the death of our reverend and pious father’.⁴³ At Gidding John had also become almost a substitute son for John Ferrar, his great-uncle, helping him in the 1650s with his writings. From his mother, his aunt, his great-uncle, and other Collett cousins he inherited many family volumes. These he left to his son, another John (1687–1763), the rector of Byfield (Northants). The rector in his lifetime apparently lent items to neighbours. At some time in the 1730s, as the Revd John Jones noted, Mr Bunbury of Great Catworth had ‘Books and MSS. Belonging to Mr. John Mapletoft’.⁴⁴ They included Nicholas Ferrar’s manuscript translation, ‘Of the Instruction of children in the Christian Doctrine’, made in 1634 of Ludovico Carbone’s Introductio ad Catechismum. Since the translation had been refused publication by ‘the authority at Cambridge’, it is all the more regrettable that this is the last sighting of the manuscript.⁴⁵

With the exception of this manuscript the rector passed the family treasures⁴⁶ to his son Richard (1725/6–1801), a surgeon of Chertsey. He in turn left them to his daughter Henrietta who died unmarried in 1859 at Canterbury ‘at an advanced age’ (she was said to be 83 at the time of the 1851 census). She next bequeathed them to a widowed childless cousin, Frances Hodges (1798–1888), a great-granddaughter of her father Richard’s younger sister, Anna Rebekah (1727–1814). At her death Mrs Hodges left them to another of Anna Rebekah’s great-grandchildren, Harold Mapletoft Davis, who had emigrated to New South Wales in 1856.⁴⁷

The heirlooms therefore ‘were sent to that distant land with much regret, for it was feared that in after years they would be lost sight of, and their association with Little Gidding completely destroyed’.⁴⁸ The regret and fear, it seems, belonged to Emily Cruwys Sharland (1849–1936), a great-niece, though only on the Hodges side, of the widow Frances. Emily’s ‘view of the matter having been set before Mr H Mapletoft Davis, he decided, after much consideration, to send the Ferrar relics back to England, stipulating that they should be disposed of either to a descendant of the family or to the trustees of some public institution’.⁴⁹ Queen Victoria, Lady Lyell (a Ferrar descendant), Clare College, Cambridge, and the British Museum were beneficiaries; and in 1894 the last consequently received the Harmony mentioned above, three Story Books and a manuscript life of Nicholas Ferrar abridged from other sources. Richard Mapletoft had added to the collection in 1791 a copy of Peter Peckard’s Memoirs of the Life of Mr Nicholas Ferrar, published the previous year, to be kept perpetually with the collection. Ironically, given Miss Sharland’s initial concerns, it was, she had to confess, ‘unaccountably lost shortly afterwards’.⁵⁰

No Harmonies are dated 1638 or 1639, but in 1640 no fewer than four were completed. With the death of Nicholas Ferrar in December 1637, leadership of the project had passed from him to his nephew and namesake, whom he had in effect trained as his successor, in partnership with his cousin Mary Collett, twenty years his senior and an expert bookbinder. Changes in 1640 and thereafter were marked: volumes were bound in velvet, polyglot volumes were planned and created, and alongside Gospel Harmonies there were now Pentateuchal harmonies that were topical rather than historical.⁵¹ There is no direct evidence that the changes introduced in 1640 had been suggested by the uncle to his nephew, but there are hints that this was so.⁵² Of the four volumes dated 1640 one was a Pentateuch and three were Gospel Harmonies. Two of the latter were comparatively plain. The title page of one declares that it was ‘Done at Little Gidding / An[n]o Dom[ini] 1640 / By / Virginia Ferrar / An[no] 12’. Since her father John was responsible for penning the manuscript title page and the running head-notes, it is likely that the twelve-year-old received help from him and was responsible only for pasting in the prints and perhaps the gospel verses. How soon the volume left Huntingdonshire for Suffolk is unknown. On fol. 3r a faint inscription ‘Thomas Jermine’ is followed on the next line by several words even less discernible. At the foot of fol. 4r is the annotation ‘Tho: & Isabella Hervey’; and in the margin of the table of contents on fol. 5r someone has twice written, one above the other, ‘1659’, a later hand having added ‘anna’ (rightly ‘anno’?) between the two. Who is Thomas Jermine, and how did the Harmony go from him at Rushbrooke to the Herveys at Ickworth? The most likely link is provided by the marriage in 1613 of Susan Jermyn (1590–1637) to Sir William Hervey (1585–1660). Either her brother, Sir Thomas Jermyn (1573–1645) or his son, another Thomas (1604–1659), will have sent the volume to Ickworth to Susan’s husband or his son, Sir Thomas Hervey (1625–1694), whose wife Isabella (1625–1686) was the daughter of the courtier Sir Humphrey May. From them the volume descended in the family until 1951 when Ickworth, and the Harmony, passed to the National Trust.⁵³

Acland-Troyte missed Thomas Jermine’s signature, but he made a more serious error in attributing the other Harmony, which he rightly saw was a family item, to Susanna (Collett) Mapletoft, named for her mother and, to avoid confusion, known in the family as Su.

He interpreted the initials ‘S M’ at the top of the first folio as hers. The initials were accompanied by a Latin motto, servire Deo sapere (‘to serve God is to be wise’). Given the subsequent descent of the Harmony, ‘S M’ is more plausibly identified as the Rev Solomon Mapletoft, a younger brother of Su Mapletoft’s husband, the Revd Joshua, and himself the husband of Su’s youngest sister Judith. The motto, moreover, was used later by other Mapletofts. Attributing the ownership to Solomon clarifies the Harmony’s descent. Solomon’s son, the Revd Hugh Mapletoft (1651–1731), married three times but had only a single daughter. Making his will on 11 June 1723, Hugh left his book s and papers to three kinsmen: his son-in-law William Lemon, and two cousins, the Revd John Mapletoft, rector of Broughton and Byfield, and the Revd John Mapletoft, prebendary of Chester. By virtue of this bequest the Harmony passed to the last named.

The prebendary’s son, yet another John (1728–1773), and, like his father, a cleric, writing in the Harmony, described himself as ‘Chaplin (sic) to the

Right Honorable L[or]d St John of Bletsoe’. Making his will on 16 July 1761, no doubt soon after marriage, he authorized his wife Mary to ‘enjoy and possess for her own sole use and service and disposal without let hindrance or molestation from any of my Relations (to whom I am not obliged for any thing in this World) whatever I die possessed of’. The will was proved on 27 February 1773, and the Harmony thus passed to the widowed Mrs Mary Mapletoft.

After forty years of childless widowhood she died intestate in March 1815. A month later on 13 April administration was granted to Richard Heming, esq. of Hillingdon who was described as her nephew and only next of kin.⁵⁴ As the heir to Mary Mapletoft but already—and far more significantly—to his father George (d. 1782) and his cousin George (1749–1807), the son of Thomas (d. 1801), Richard was already extremely rich. The Heming brothers had been the principal goldsmiths to George III from the time of his accession until 1782.

From Richard Heming the Harmony passed equally to his four unmarried daughters; hence the printed label in the front of the Harmony: ‘Miss Heming. Hillingdon’. Henrietta, the youngest and, on 27 November 1901, the last to die, bequeathed the house and its contents to her executor and nephew, J. A. T. Garratt (1842–1919) of Bishops Court near Exeter, the son of her sister Anne. Shortly before his death his wife in July 1918, in answer to a request, wrote a misleading account of ‘how the Harmony of the Gospels came into the family’. Sure knowledge of the Harmony came only in 1997 from a Sothebys sale catalogue:⁵⁵ the Harmony ‘once owned by Miss Heming of Hillingdon Hall […] sold in our rooms 8 April 1957, lot 17, to Alan Thomas’, the antiquarian bookdealer. Almost immediately thereafter the Harmony surfaced in the hands of Philip C. Duschnes, a rare book dealer of 757 Madison. Avenue, New York. From London, Duschnes sent an overnight cable to Dr F. A. Jordan of Cortland NY reporting the availability of the Harmony because the owner was in straitened circumstances but did not wish the fact to be generally known.⁵⁶ Duschnes offered Dr Jordan the Harmony together with Acland-Troyte’s 1888 communication to the Society of Antiquaries and a manuscript scrapbook kept by Thomas Parkin. By 16 October 1962, Dr Jordan owned all three, which duly passed to his son, by whom they were sold in 2000 and they remain in the United States.

The clue to their twentieth-century provenance in the missing years seemed at first to lie in the companionship of the Harmony and the Parkin scrapbook. Kept by Thomas Parkin (1845–1932), it is entitled ‘NICHOLAS FERRAR AND LITTLE GIDDING[,] NOTES AND EXTRACTS[,] MS. OF LECTURE BY T. PARKIN M.A. F.R.HIST.SC. (sic)’. Parkin (the younger son of the Vicar of Halton, Hastings, a domestic chaplain to Earl Waldegrave) was educated at Rugby and Trinity College, Cambridge, and was called to the bar in 1874. He never married, and may never have practised, reserving his admiration for his more successful elder brother John (1843–1931) and his enthusiasm for Little Gidding. That this scrapbook should accompany the Harmony across the Atlantic suggested that they had been together when the Harmony was sold to Alan Thomas, and that Parkin had bought the Harmony in the 1920s. But this was not the case. The Harmony had remained with the Garratts and it was the Bishops Court estate that sent it to the saleroom in 1957.⁵⁷ The presence of Parkin’s scrapbook alongside the Heming Harmony thus remains a mystery, comparable, it seems, to the presence of the bewildered sheep in Stubbs’s painting of Col. O’Kelly’s thoroughbred Dungannon, of which the Sporting Magazine remarked, ‘the great attachment of this horse to a sheep, which by some accident got into his paddock, is very singular’.⁵⁸

The third of the 1640 Gospel Harmonies is a very different affair. Intended for the Prince of Wales, it not only harmonized the four gospels but presented the Harmony in four languages, English, Latin, French, and Italian. Bound in green velvet, gold stamped and with a gilt fore-edge, its arrival at Westminster was recorded in detail by John Ferrar.⁵⁹ Accompanied by his father, young Nicholas was presented to the king on Maundy Thursday 1640. Remembering his Uncle Nicholas’s rule never to make a gift to a subordinate without first consulting that person’s superior, he offered the king, as proof of his ability to create such a Harmony, two manuscript volumes: a gospel in eight languages, and a New Testament in twenty-four. (Both have disappeared.) Impressed by the young man, and noting that they both stammered, King Charles promised his future patronage.

It was perhaps on this occasion that Archbishop Laud received the Pentateuch, bound in purple velvet, now at St John’s College, Oxford, of which he had formerly been president. There it has remained ever since, and by its state shows that it has been easily the most consulted of all the surviving Harmonies.

On Good Friday 1640, the day after his royal audience at Whitehall, young Nicholas Ferrar presented the polyglot Harmony at Richmond to the Prince of Wales. Even though received enthusiastically,⁶⁰ it is unlikely that the prince took it with him when shortly thereafter he was summoned to join the king at Whitehall. For the next century and a half the Pentateuch’s existence is unrecorded. It then surfaces, having a bookplate on its marbled endpaper bearing the coronet and arms of the Earl of Normanton in the Irish peerage.⁶¹ The top left-hand corner of fol. 1v has a price of eight guineas, but no indication of when or how the earl-archbishop acquired the book, which remains with his descendant, the present earl.

By 1704, the date on the Earl of Salisbury’s bookplate, a similar Harmony almost as lavish and bound in purple velvet was at Hatfield, where it still is. How much earlier it arrived at Hatfield is not known.⁶² In 1929 G. D. Hobson plausibly suggested that it was the volume made for James Duke of York, the later King James II;⁶³ by 1959 Kenneth Hobson, at Sangorski and Sutcliffe, without offering evidence, had turned this possibility into a certainty.⁶⁴ In April 1640 James was at Richmond with his elder brother when young Nicholas Ferrar presented the polyglot Harmony: ‘the little duke of York’, as John Ferrar later recalled and wrote, in answer to a request from Lambeth: having also seen the book, and fine pictures in it, came to NF, and said unto him, Will you not make me also such another fine book? I pray you do it. NF replied, his grace should not fail to have one made for him also. But said the duke, How long will it be before I have it? With all good speed, said NF. But how long time will that be? I pray tell the gentlewomen at Gidding I will heartily thank them, if they will dispatch it. […] All the courtiers standing by heartily laughed to see the duke’s earnestness, who would have no nay, but a promise speedily to have one made for him, like his brothers.

To this John Ferrar has added an afterthought in the margin: ‘The book which was made and finished for the duke never had opportunity to be presented to his grace. It is yet still at Gidding.’⁶⁵

The Harmony now at Hatfield differs from that presented to the prince; bound in purple, not green, it is not polyglot, merely a Gospel Harmony in English. Moreover, it is unclear when John Ferrar penned his answer and to whom. To his correspondent Ferrar acknowledged himself ‘bound by the greate obligation of your worth’ and he signed off as ‘your much obleidged in all love and service’. If he were writing to Archbishop Laud, his letter dates from the years 1640–43 before Ferrar took some of his family with him to the Low Countries. If, as is less likely, he was writing to someone else at Lambeth after his return in 1646, the recipient is unknown.

Writing from Abbots Ripton to Thomas Hearne in 1731, the Revd John Jones offered an explanation,⁶⁶ commenting that the most remarkable Harmonies were those given to Charles II and the Duke of York after the Restoration. Jones (wrongly) assumed the polyglot Harmony was still in the library at St James’s Palace, but stated that the Duke of York’s copy had been presented by Godmanchester’s parson to one of the late bishops of Lincoln, either Tenison (1692–95) or Gardiner (1695–1705). From 1691 to 1729 the Godmanchester parson was James Heywood. Jones explained: ‘His father was Closet Keeper to ye D. of York, & so came by that specimen: Where it now lies, I can’t learn, possibly at Bugden.’ If Jones is correct in thinking the Harmony was at some point at the Bishop of Lincoln’s Buckden Palace, it seems likely that Heywood senior ‘liberated’ the Harmony when James fled to France. Buckden, it should be noted, is a mere thirty miles north of Hatfield on the Great North Road.

Also bound in purple velvet is the spectacular Pentateuch that was Gidding’s final Harmony. The last of the scissors-and-paste volumes created at Little Gidding, it was still not quite complete in the spring of 1642 when the king, on his way north to York, called at the manor house with the prince, the Palsgrave his nephew, and other courtiers, and asked to see it. Already ‘the largeness and weight of it was such, that he that carried it seemed to be well laden. Which the duke [of Lennox] observing, said, Sir, one of your strongest guard will but be able to carry this book.’ (The volume now has the warning that it should be carried by two people.) And the Palsgrave remarked to the prince his cousin, ‘Sir, your father the king is master of the goodliest ship in the world [the Sovereign of the Seas]; and I may now say, you will be master of the gallantest greatest book in the world. For I never saw such paper before, and believe there is no book of that largeness to be seen in Christendom.’⁶⁷

We have only John Jones’s remark that the volume reached the prince after the Restoration in 1660, but it seems virtually certain that it did so. Jacob Bourdillon, having purchased the volume in 1776, writing in 1779 in Latin, states (in my translation, and with my two amplifications) ‘that the same volume came at length into the possession of that most Noble Man, Robert Harley, honoured by Queen Anne with the title of Earl of Oxford, from whose [son’s] great library Cesar de Missy formerly a Pastor of the Savoy [Chapel] in Westminster bought that volume at a vast price. After his death, still at no indifferent price, it became mine.’

Thus with de Missy’s purchase the volume entered the orbit of the Huguenot community in London.⁶⁸ Bourdillon too was a Huguenot cleric, originally from Geneva, who had served various Huguenot congregations in London since 1732. Dying on 3 June 1776, in his will he had made bequests to various Huguenot institutions and charities and bequeathed his manuscripts to a nephew but without mentioning his books.

Presumably by sale, the Pentateuch passed to Samuel Robert Gaussens MP (1759–1812), of Brookmans Park, Hatfield, the son and heir of Peter Gaussens (1723–1781), another Huguenot, who had been a governor of the Bank of England and a director of the East India Company. For four more generations the family and the Pentateuch remained at Brookmans Park, but in 1922 the MP’s great-great-granddaughter sold the estate and sent the Pentateuch to auction.⁶⁹ Offered as the ‘property of the late Mrs Selina Gaussens’, her mother (who had died in 1915), it failed to sell on 28 March 1923,⁷⁰ and was bought in at £410.⁷¹ The Gaussens with their sons had meanwhile departed to Australia, the Pentateuch being deposited in the Victoria and Albert Museum on loan until 1953. That year it was presented to Her Majesty on the occasion of her coronation, and is now at Windsor. Two events had curtailed the bookmaking at Little Gidding for most of the 1640s. When activity resumed briefly for a last moment in 1649, the religious impetus behind it was muted. Loyalty to the dead monarch and the hope of commercial gain pushed the religious element into third place. But even more influential than the outbreak of the civil wars in bringing his uncle’s plan to a halt was the premature death of young Nicholas Ferrar in the spring of 1640. His death left the development of multilingual Harmonies stillborn. The Pentateuch of 1640 in four western European languages was a mere toe dipped in the waters of translation. Young Nicholas’s ‘proufe book’ now at Clare College reveals the extent of his ambition, and the dictionaries given after his death by John Mapletoft to the library of Trinity College, Cambridge, suggests that the ambition was no mere pipe dream.⁷² The two volumes presented to King Charles in 1640 suggest what was lost. The gospel’s eight languages were three classical (Hebrew, Greek, and Latin) and five modern (English, Welsh, French, Spanish, and German); the New Testament offered twenty-four languages, including Syriac, Arabic, and Ethiopic, the rest European. Nor was this the limit of young Nicholas’s intentions. He planned to add Chaldaean, Samaritan, and Armenian, and his geographical range was to extend to Japanese in the east and North America in the west for a grand total of fifty tongues.⁷³ But the end was silence.

What had begun as a private endeavour had become a public enterprise. Of the fifteen surviving Harmonies six had been created for the family, six for the king and his sons, one for Archbishop Laud and two for neighbouring gentry. By the late nineteenth century they had become matter of interest to bibliographers, and by the start of the twenty-first, eleven of the fifteen were in academic institutions, one was at Windsor, and only three were still in private hands, not one being still with the family.

Some of the material in this article has been previously printed in my ‘The Lost Books of Little Gidding’, Records of Huntingdonshire, 4/5 (2022), 35–44, and is reprinted here by kind permission of the Huntingdon Local Record Society.

Footnotes