Het Boek. Serie 3. Jaargang 33

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A.N.L. Munby
The Netherlands government's purchase of Phillipps manuscripts in 1888

Sir Thomas Phillipps died in 1872. For forty years he had given much anxious thought to the future of the vast collection of manuscripts to which he had devoted his life. Negotiations had been conducted with half-a-dozen libraries and institutions with a view to their receiving the Bibliotheca Phillippica as a bequest, but Sir Thomas's temperament was an effective stumbling-block to any successful outcome, and indeed usually guaranteed failure at the very outset. In the event he left his Cheltenham residence, Thirlestaine House, and its precious contents in the hands of trustees for the benefit of his daughter Katharine Fenwick for her life and thereafter to her third son Thomas FitzRoy Fenwick for his life. In this way the testator sought to secure the preservation of his collection intact for two generations at least.

The bequest was a perplexing one for Katharine Fenwick and her husband, the Rev. John Edward Addison Fenwick, vicar of Needwood in the diocese of Lichfield, who found themselves custodians of the most famous private library in Europe housed in a mansion of sixty rooms, one of them seventy feet in length. Their crushing responsibilities had few compensations. All manner of irksome conditions hedged round their occupation of Thirlestaine House: volumes for example might not even be moved from one room to another by anyone except the trustees or the Fenwicks in person; and the arrangement of the books at Phillipps's death rendered the house wellnigh inhabitable. Most serious of all however was the fact that the money left by Phillipps for the upkeep of the great house and library was totally inadequate. There were no funds to pay even a fire insurance premium on the library, let alone the salary of a competent librarian who would deal with the scholarly enquiries which poured in upon the Fenwicks from all parts of the learned world. John Fenwick however conscientiously

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tried to honour the terms of the trust and in 1879 his son Thomas FitzRoy, who had recently completed his education at Oxford, began to assume his share of the burden. By 1881 most of the correspondence was answered by the son and he took full charge of the library two years later: but the problem of lack of funds for the collection's upkeep remained intractable.

Legal reforms however were afoot which alleviated the Fenwicks' predicament. Under the Settled Land Acts of 1882 and 1884 the Court of Chancery was authorised to allow trustees to sell heirlooms however strictly the testator might have prescribed their preservation. It was necessary, of course, for the trustees to justify such a sale by producing evidence on the financial position of the life-tenants and on the value, interest, bulk and deteriorability of the heirlooms, but there was little difficulty in convincing the Court that the Fenwicks were entitled to benefit from the provisions of these Acts. On 23 November 1885 Mr. Justice Pearson authorised the trustees to sell any of the manuscripts and any duplicate printed books in the Phillipps Library. The details of the sale of each part however had to be submitted separately to the Court for its approval, and to this extent the Law sought to protect the trustees from making bad bargains or from acting impulsively.

Young FitzRoy Fenwick (as he styled himself at that date) lost little time in preparing groups of books and manuscripts for sale. The first portion of the duplicate printed books was assigned to Messrs. Sotheby's auction-rooms and sold on 3 August 1886 and the seven following days. During the same summer he printed a special catalogue of the 624 Meerman manuscripts and wrote to Theodor Mommsen suggesting that the Prussian Government should open negotiations for their acquisition en bloc, a transaction which was successfully concluded twelve months later. The publicity attendant upon the sale at Sotheby's stimulated several enquiries for future dispersais. The earliest of these came from Holland and was due to the enterprise of Samuel Muller, Keeper of the Royal Archives at Utrecht, son of Frederik Muller (1817-81) a well-known antiquarian bookseller of Amsterdam.

‘Sir,’ wrote Muller to John Fenwick on 13 July 1886, ‘In the famous collections of Sir Thomas Phillipps there are several manuscripts, bought sixty years ago in a public auction at Leyden, that have formerly formed part of the Utrecht archives. I am of course anxious to keep them in view, and, should the opportunity present itself, to secure their return to the place, where they may be studied in connection with the other fruits of the same tree. This duty, laid upon me alike by my charge and by my personal interest in Dutch mediaeval history, may excuse me, if I apply directly to you with a demand, that otherwise could seem indiscreet. You alone can give me the absolutely sure information I want’.

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Phillipps had indeed possessed a very substantial number of Dutch manuscripts, mostly deeds, bought in 1826 at the sale of the library of Petrus van Musschenbroek, who had in his turn acquired a large portion of the collection of Pieter Bondam, Professor at Utrecht University. Bondam had owned a large collection of charters &c., ‘borrowed’ from public record offices. Phillipps had also purchased a good many individual Dutch manuscripts from various sources during his Continental tours in the eighteen-twenties, especially from the two bookselling houses of Verbelen and Verbeyst at Brussels.

Muller went on to say that he had been startled by the announcement in The Athenaeum of the sale of part of Phillipps's collection at Sotheby's, and was apprehensive lest the Utrecht manuscripts should appear suddenly in some future sale, at too short notice for him to take the measures necessary for their purchase. He asked Fenwick whether he might come and inspect the manuscripts, and proposed a visit to Cheltenham in August or September for this purpose.

On 29 July FitzRoy Fenwick replied on his father's behalf. ‘It is not yet quite decided,’ he wrote, ‘whether we part with any of our MSS; at any rate we should only part with a certain number & that number would be almost certain to include the Dutch MSS., in fact they would probably be the first to go. Of course if we decide to sell we should in the interests of literature be glad to see the MSS. as far as possible kept together & should therefore be willing to give your Government an opportunity of purchasing privately if it was inclined do so. The MSS. to which you specially refer are, I presume, those purchased by my Grandfather at the Musschenbroek sale in 1826, and are I know of very great importance for Dutch history but besides these we have many other MSS., deeds & charters relating to other parts of the Kingdom than Utrecht’. Fenwick concluded his letter with some questions about Dutch libraries and record offices, and expressed his readiness to allow Muller to inspect the manuscripts in the near future.

Muller wrote appreciatively by return of post. He explained that he had immediately in view the acquisition of only half a dozen manuscripts and some boxes of deeds, but that he would raise the question of the larger transaction with the Government. On 6 August he wrote again saying that his friend Mr. van Hasselt, who had worked for two years as a volunteer in the Utrecht Record Office, was intending to visit his family at Plymouth and, if it were convenient to Fenwick, would inspect the manuscripts at Cheltenham during the same journey to England. Fenwick acceded to this request, proposing a date in September for van Hasselt's visit, and in the event both Muller and van Hasselt contrived to make the journey to Cheltenham. Thereafter matters moved slowly. On 23 November Muller wrote apologetically to Fenwick stating that he still awaited the report which van Hasselt

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was to compile from his notes, and that without it he hesitated to open his correspondence with the Minister of the Interior. On 2 January 1887 Fenwick intimated to Muller that if no proposal were made by the end of the month he would feel at liberty to attempt to seil the manuscripts elsewhere. ‘You are quite right,’ replied Muller on 4 January. ‘Your kind letter tells me in very polite terms, that you want to see something more than words, words. And I see quite clearly, that you must think, I am playing the fooi with you. I cannot ask you to excuse me, as you have too much reason to be angry with me; I can only explain, unfortunately again only with words’.

Van Hasselt, it appeared, had been appointed underkeeper of the records at 's Hertogenbosch, and the assumption of his new duties had diverted his energies from compiling the report. His engagement to be married had provided a further preoccupation. ‘This soliciting a lady and a place at once may have turned his head’, explained Muller. He had however handed his notes over to Muller who was preparing to write the report himself: and on 9 January he was able to inform Fenwick that he had completed a memorandum of forty-eight folio pages which was even then being abridged for the Minister's use. He raised the question of including in the deal the Dutch manuscripts which formed part of the Meerman collection, but Fenwick, who was already in correspondence with the Prussian Government about the sale of the whole Meerman group, naturally declined to sell part separately. The block which was the subject of the Dutch negotiation comprised therefore finally one hundred and seventysix manuscripts or groups of manuscripts each bearing a single Philipps number, together with fourteen boxes of unnumbered deeds. These, after a further exchange of letters with Muller, Fenwick formally offered to the Minister of the Interior in a letter written from St. Moritz on 3 March 1887. The price asked for the collection was £2750 subject to the approval of the Court of Chancery. On 8 April Fenwick wrote a little plaintively to Muller saying that his letter had not received even a bare acknowledgement, but on the same day the Graaf van Bylandt (1818-93), Netherlands Minister in London since 1871, wrote to say that he had been instructed to enter into negotiations with Fenwick and invited him to call at the Netherlands Legation, 40 Grosvenor Gardens, for discussions on the subject. On 13 April Muller wrote cordially. He had been consulted, he said, about the price and had suggested some abatement. He scouted a suggestion made by Fenwick that the latter should call at The Hague on his way home from Switzerland and confer verbally with the Minister of the Interior. ‘I think his Excellency is personally rather indifferent about Manuscripts’, he wrote, ‘and if he consented I think he may have been strongly urged to it, as the Parliament manifested a strong wish for economy as the

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budget for 1887 was voted’. A most friendly invitation to visit Amsterdam for the celebration of the King's seventieth birthday followed, but a family bereavement necessitated Fenwick's hurried return to England.

At the Netherlands Legation in London the Graaf van Bylandt handed Fenwick a translation of Muller's memorandum on the matter of price, a substantial document running to thirteen folio pages. The archivist underlined the great difficulty of valuing unique items such as manuscripts, and stated at the outset that he did not find Fenwick's figure exorbitant. If the manuscripts were sold at auction at The Hague he thought that f. 10,000 or at the most f. 15,000 would secure all the manuscripts of importance, but, Muller added, in the English market substantially higher prices prevailed, and a sale by auction in England would probably not be to the advantage of the Dutch Government. Fourteen of the items, including five of the most precious, concerned not only Holland, but other countries as well and would inevitably attract competition from foreign libraries. If moreover the Fenwick family was not inclined to submit the collection to the hazard of a sale at auction, they might well dispose of the block to a private collector, in whose hands the manuscripts might remain inaccessible to Dutch scholars. On those grounds a high price should be given, and bearing this in mind Muller had arrived at a total of f. 21,347, and van Hasselt, in an independent calculation, at the sum of f. 26,000. Feeling however that he was unfamiliar with English commercial prices Muller had also enlisted the help of Dr. Tiele, Librarian of the University of Utrecht, who was a regular student of the catalogues issued by Quaritch and other English booksellers. Dr. Tiele's valuation was f. 19,715 but Muller, as an archivist, was of the opinion that the librarian had seriously underestimated the importance of the very large collections of charters, and felt no hesitation in recommending that Dr. Tiele's figure should be raised by f. 4000 or more. After weighing all the factors once again Muller felt able to recommend the Government to offer no more than f. 24,000 (£2000) for the whole collection.

During the summer Fenwick's negotiations with the Prussian Government over the Meerman manuscripts kept him fully occupied, and it was not until 3 September 1887 that he found time to write to van Bylandt in detail. In a letter of twelve quarto pages he attempted to demolish Muller's case for a reduction in price. He belittled a suggestion that the collection would only be of interest to the Dutch Government and that the market therefore was a limited one, underlining his point by stating that the Dutch manuscripts in the Meerman collection had already been sold to another foreign government. Muller had asserted that Phillipps had bought many of the manuscripts in Holland for low prices, to which Fenwick replied that sixty years had elapsed

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since their purchase and that during that period the price of manuscripts had risen at least six-fold. To Dr. Tiele's valuation he attached little weight on the ground that it was unreasonable to attempt to value manuscripts without seeing them. While Fenwick would prefer to have the records restored to their rightful place at Utrecht he would not hesitate to seil them by auction if negotiations were to break down, nor would he risk selling them as one lot but in parcels of twenty or thirty deeds each, a system which would make their dispersal almost inevitable. He stressed that he was not a free agent in the matter, nor was he acting for himself alone. He had to satisfy both his trustees and the Court of Chancery that he had kept in mind the interests of the estate.

On 7 September Fenwick wrote to Muller, explaining that he could not agree with the latter's valuation and telling for his private ear alone that a third party was treating for a block of manuscripts, including a number which were on Muller's list, and that if no reasonably speedy decision were to arrive from the Dutch Government he would feel at liberty to negotiate in other quarters. This was not mere promotional sales-talk, for a Belgian purchasing mission was at that moment visiting Thirlestaine House. Muller's reply of 10 September was of great length. He asked if he might show Fenwick's private letter to the Minister of the Interior. On the matter of price he suggested that the dispute might be resolved by the question being submitted to a neutral foreign arbitrator of universally acknowledged distinction and integrity such as Léopold Delisle, head of the Bibliothèque Nationale, or Wilhelm Wattenbach, editor-in-chief of Monumenta Germaniae Historica, but this proposal Fenwick politely declined in a letter of 17 September, stating with some truth that both Delisle and Wattenbach might be interested themselves in the acquisition of part of the manuscripts if the Dutch negotiations came to nothing. In the middle of November Fenwick wrote again to the Netherlands Legation asking for a decision, and on 19 November van Bylandt forwarded to his correspondent a translation of yet another memorandum drawn up by Muller. In his covering letter van Bylandt stated that his Government was not prepared to raise its price. ‘The Netherlands Government’, he concluded, ‘therefore venture to believe that you will yourself, as well as the Trustees of the collection in Chancery Court, see the great advantage of accepting the very fair, serious and sure offer made, and thus avoiding the trouble and doubtful result of a public auction’. Muller's memorandum (an answer to Fenwick's letter of 3 September 1887) runs to twenty-one quarto pages and is a reasoned justification of his original estimate. Whether Fenwick was swayed by the cogency of its temperately expressed arguments, or crushed by the sheer weight of memoranda and correspondence, there is no means of knowing: but

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at all events he wrote to van Bylandt on 24 November asking whether in the event of his accepting two thousand pounds the money would be fortcoming immediately. On 5 December he visited the Netherlands Legation at van Bylandt's request and a draft contract was drawn up, a draft which was subsequently emended after van Bylandt had submitted it to the Dutch lawyers, who among other alterations inserted a clause stating that the vendor should pay all legal expenses. On 6 December the Court of Chancery gave its blessing to the transaction. Nine days later Muller sent a triumphant telegram worded ‘Second Chamber approval’, denoting that funds had been voted for the purchase, but everything did not go smoothly even at this stage. Fenwick flatly refused to pay a bill for £5/6/ - for the registration and stamping of the contract and declined, not unreasonably, to accept payment of his £2000 in The Hague rather than in London. Until these two points were resolved he was unwilling to sign the contract. These matters were outside the jurisdiction of the Minister in London, who had to consult his Government once more. It was not until 28 January 1888 that he was able to report a solution of both problems. The legal expenses were to be paid out of his own pocket by Mr. J. Heemskerk Azn, Minister of the Interior, since no Government, department was prepared to foot the bill: and when Muller had certified that the manuscripts had been handed over, Fenwick was to receive a bill of exchange payable in London. The contract was duly signed but the lawyers found fresh grit to throw into the works. The certification of a Power of Attorney granted by Mrs. Katharine Fenwick in favour of her son FitzRoy was the occasion for more argument, and the mode of handing over the manuscripts and of payment for them was the subject of a further exchange of several letters, marked on both sides by a note of increasing asperity. Fenwick's suggestion that Muller should hand over a cheque in exchange for the manuscripts was too simple a plan to commend itself to the Treasury officials at The Hague. Muller had travelled to London and was holding himself in readiness to proceed to Cheltenham, but he had to cool his heels for ten days before the final impediments were removed. It was not until the last day of February that the Utrecht archivist received finally the manuscripts for which he had opened negotiations over a year and a half before. There are nearly sixty letters on the subject in the Fenwick file alone, including a dozen from the Netherlands Minister, not to mention two massive memoranda; and the imagination wilts at the total manhours devoted to the transaction. It is true that Fenwick was not an easy man with whom to negotiate (he was not Sir Thomas Phillipps's grandson for nothing). The library was the Fenwick patrimony; it had been assembled at great sacrifice and was only to be sold to the best possible advantage.

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The Dutch must share with the Irish Government, and with Mr. Pierpont Morgan, the distinction of being the only purchasers of manuscripts who secured any reduction from Fenwick's estimate of the value of his wares. Credit for this must go to Samuel Muller, who not only initiated the transaction, but who carried the proceedings through with a courtesy, tact, patience and pertinacity, which triumphed in the end over both an obdurate vendor and the formidable obstacles which legalistic officialdom strewed in his path.

Note

The purchase made by the Netherlands Government in 1888 comprised the manuscripts listed under the following numbers in Sir Thomas Phillipps's privately-printed Catalogus Librorum Manuscriptorum, 1837-[1871] and (from No. 24095 onwards) in the manuscript continuation compiled by T.F. Fenwick:

543, 1067, 1124, 1134, 1136, 1138, 1140, 1141, 1271, 1272, 2197, 2276, 2337, 2524, 2637-2639, 2906, 3209, 3211, 3213, 3215, 3218, 3220-3223, 3227-3229, 3232-3234, 3236, 3238-3247, 3249-3252, 3254-3304, 3306, 3307, 3309, 3313-3332, 3543, 3562-3570, 3571 *, 3573 *-3576 *, 3947, 3964, 4005, 4013, 4014, 4253, 6964, 7158, 7320, 8406, 8803, 8804, 8959, 9757, 10676, 11052, 11588, 11848, 11853, 11881, 11905, 13278, 13347, 15672, 22277, 24095, 24225, 25479, 25503, 25673, 26590, 26999, 27000, 27001, 27123, 27458, 27831, 28219, 29338; plus fourteen boxes of deeds which bore no catalogue numbers. The collection was subsequently divided between the Royal Library at The Hague, the University libraries of Groningen, Leyden and Utrecht, and the State and Municipal Record Offices at Amsterdam, Arnhem, Gouda, Haarlem, The Hague, 's Hertogenbosch, Leeuwarden, Middleburg, Utrecht and Zwolle. Nearly all the individual locations are recorded in the appendix of Henri Omont's Catalogue des manuscrits latins et français de la collection Phillipps acquis en 1908 pour la Bibliothèque nationale, Paris, 1909.

I am much indebted to Dr H. de la Fontaine Verwey for the following additional notes on the transaction from Dutch sources which were unknown to me:

Samuel Muller himself has given a short notice on the purchase of the Phillipps manuscripts, De aankoop der Hollandsche handschriften van Sir Thomas Phillipps te Cheltenham, Bijdragen voor Vaderlandsche geschiedenis en oudheidkunde, 3e reeks, 5e deel (1889), p. 104-122. He mentions gratefully the help he received in this affair from Mr J. Heemskerk Azn, minister of the Interior, and from Mr Victor de Stuers, chief of the department of arts and sciences. The official report, announced by Samuel Muller, never appeared in print. Mr Louis van Hasselt (1847-1900) received his nomination as an archivist of the Archives of Noordbrabant at 's Hertogenbosch on 10 december 1866. Afterwards he became chief archivist of Overijssel at Zwolle. In order to study the contents of the Phillipps manuscripts Muller bought a complete copy of the catalogues from Messrs Quaritch. Afterwards this copy was given to the Royal Library at The Hague.
A copy of the Van Musschenbroek-sale, where Phillipps bought through the agency of Bohn, with annotations of the director of the auction, Mr Bodel Nyenhuis, is in the University Library of Amsterdam.
I am also grateful to Messrs. Lionel and Philip Robinson, owners of the Phillipps papers, for placing at my disposal Fenwick's files of correspondence which have provided the basis of this article.