Two Unsolved Penshurst Mysteries
For some years now I have been at work, with the permission of Lord De L'Isle, on an edition of the seventeenth-century library catalogue of the Sidney family of Penshurst Place. The library was a large one (about 5000 volumes) and the task has been a complex one, but fascinating for those who, like myself, work on the history of books. Two problems have arisen, however, to which I have failed to find a solution, and I am hoping the members of the Kent Archaeological Society can help. The first is the rumor that in 1666, the library in fact burned down. The second is a statement by Robert Sidney, second earl of Leicester, that at some point in the period 1665-75, his library had been invaded by "spoylers," and books to the value of two hundred pounds taken away.
The reference to the conflagration is in an entry for 1671 in the Life and Times of the Oxford antiquary Anthony Wood. The Sidneys, he writes, from the time of King Edward VI,
have been collectors of books and have furnished such an eminent library that there were 3 thousand folios in it, besides others, and some MSS. Seven score years in collecting. This library was burnt between 9 and 12 on Maundy Thursday morning 1666, when several fires at that time were thereabouts.
I have made a careful search in Anthony Wood's papers in the Bodleian Library, and in his letters in the British Library, but can find no record of where he obtained this information, nor why he entered it in his pocket diary in 1671, five years after the alleged fire took place.
A likely source would be information given to him by John Aubrey, but that trail has also proved unprofitable. But did a fire actually take place? In all the De L'Isle family papers there is no mention at this or any later date of a fire at Penshurst: not of the fire, not of the carting away of burned timbers, not of rebuilding, not in letters, not in account books, nothing. With one exception, I have found no other seventeenth-century references to such an event, nor any later ones. Which does not of course mean that it didn't happen; it's just that you would expect Edward Hasted and other early antiquarians to remember that sort of thing.
The exception is a reference in Thomas Smith's preliminary essay to the catalogue of the Cottonian Library (1696):
Among the illustrious men who had frequent contact with him [Cotton], whether in speech or by letter, in their tireless zeal for the collection of books ... [was] Robert Sydney Earl of Leicester. But these noble libraries so eminently worthy of their owners have fallen victim ... to the corrosive effects of time on the heritage and goods of noblemen, or have suffered irreparable loss in an actual fire, as was the lamentable fate of the Sydney library which the illustrious Earl, his son and successors inspired by the same love of literature had each in turn enriched with great acquisitions and which was destroyed some thirty years ago when the great house of Penshurst went up in flames.
The anecdote, repeated a generation after the event, suggests that a fire of some sort may have occurred. Yet the very extravagance of the description makes me suspicious. Penshurst still stands, despite later changes very much the aged pile that Ben Jonson described. Among later book lists (1675, 1723) there is good evidence of the continuity of the library, and a substantial Sidney family library was sold at auction in 1743. So if any Kentish historian knows of local information which might confirm or deny Anthony Wood's statement, I would be very glad to know about it.
The second Penshurst mystery emerges from a booklist compiled by Robert, second earl of Leicester, in 1675, when he was eighty. Written out on January 16, 1675/6, the list was prompted by what was apparently a violent removal of books from his study at an undetermined date several years earlier. I have no idea what caused persons unknown to make off with about 200 pounds worth of books from Penshurst. The document is in the elderly owner's quavering hand, and at the bottom he has written "I cannot tell the number of English Books of a lesser volume which are took away in the spoyl. Many miscell. & concord. are missing: so that upon serious consideration, I think that my loss at the least amounts to two hundred pounds. Upon 5 or 6 revisions of my Books, I miss about 44 which I am sure were in my study before the spoylers came there." The books had been missing for some time; he notes that he had been able to buy back his copy of Hobbes at Ridgwell, "about three years after my books were took away," but this does not tell us when the original invasion took place. At any rate, a month after the list quoted above, Lord Leicester wrote out another list to report the return of the books from a Mr. Alston "by Alexander Bell's cart." Again, here is an event I cannot identify. Perhaps a local historian will recognize details which will tell me when and why the "spoylers" took Lord Leicester's books, and who they might have been. Was this invasion of his study connected with some local political or religious disagreement?
If there are Kentish historians whose knowledge of diaries, letters, and other local records might cast light on either of these mysteries, I would be glad to hear from them, and I and my co-editors (Dr. William Bowen and Dr. Joseph L. Black) will gratefully acknowledge their assistance in our edition. Please write to me as follows: Prof. Germaine Warkentin, Victoria College, University of Toronto, 73 Queen's Park Crescent, Toronto, Ontario Canada M5S 1K7 (e-mail: warkent@chass.utoronto.ca).
Germaine Warkentin