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Dr. John Dee’s history has often been written, and the catalogue of the MSS. he owned has long been in print in a Camden society volume (Diary of Dr. John Dee) edited by Halliwell. The main facts of his life that concern us are that he lived at Mortlake, and in 1584 went on a wild journey to Poland. In his absence his house and collections were plundered by a mob, who, not without excuse, thought him a warlock. When he returned in 1589 he set himself to recover his scattered property, and to a great extent succeeded. He moved from Mortlake to Manchester, being made Warden of the college there in 1595; later on he returned, and died at Mortlake, much in debt, I think, in 1608. I find from Archbishop Ussher’s printed correspondence that his books were still unsold in 1624; litigation may have prevented their being dealt with earlier. The lists we have of his MSS. date from before his foreign tour; that which is in print was made on the eve of his departure, and contains a little over 200 entries.

After the vicissitudes which his collection suffered it is remarkable that one should still be able to identify as extant well over half of it. I have been helped in my searches by certain marks–a little ladder, or the astrological sign of Jupiter, or a [Greek: Delta]–which occur on the first page of many. His handwriting, too, in notes, and certain names of owners (particularly P. Saunders) are guides. Some of his MSS. were bought by Ussher, and are at Trinity College, Dublin, and a few were bought by Cotton. But the largest group of them is at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. These were acquired by the great Oxford antiquary, Brian Twyne, who hoped that his college would buy them from him, but this they would not do. Happily Twyne was not too much hurt by the refusal to leave them to the college at his death. I guess that one reason for his buying them was that some (perhaps many) of them had once belonged to his grandfather, John Twyne, a Canterbury man of some slight eminence, who in his turn had secured a considerable “lot” of MSS. from the library of St. Augustine’s Abbey. In searching out the relics of that great library I found the combination, or pedigree, St. Augustine’s–John Twyne–Dee–Brian Twyne–Corpus Christi, to be a frequent one, and this set me upon a general investigation of Dee’s MSS. A little notebook of his at Corpus Christi showed that in early life he had borrowed a number of MSS. from Peterhouse and from Queen’s College, Oxford. I did not find that these ever got back to their sources, but I do not think that Dee was dishonest in the matter; I believe he was allowed to keep them for some consideration received. Some of the Peterhouse books are traceable in the Ashmole collection, the Pepys Library, and the British Museum; of those of Queen’s College I can say nothing. Dee was specially interested in mathematics, alchemy, and, as everyone knows, converse with spirits, but his library was not confined to books on these subjects; he had some excellent historical, literary, and theological MSS. One of them was the best copy of Alfred’s translation of Orosius.

Another library of the sixteenth century deserves to be singled out from the many which offer themselves for notice. It is that of Lord Lumley (d. 1609); he inherited the books from Henry Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel (d. 1580). This collection had again been largely recruited from that of Archbishop Cranmer: the combination T(homae) C(ranmeri) C(antuar)–Arundel–Lumley, is often found written on the lower margin of the first leaf of the MSS. concerned. These Arundel MSS., by the way, must not be confounded with the Arundel collection in the British Museum, nor with that remnant of the same collection which is owned by the College of Arms. The Arundel MSS., so-called, were collected largely by Lord William Howard (Belted Will) of Naworth, passed on to Thomas, Earl of Arundel (d. 1644), and devised by Henry Howard to the Royal Society, 1681; they were eventually transferred by the Society to the British Museum in 1831. The Arundel-Lumley books had a different destiny. Most of them also came to the Museum, but by another path. They were bought after Lumley’s death by or for Prince Henry, eldest son of James I., and added to the Royal Library, and that became national property by the gift of George II. in 1757. We have a catalogue, made about 1609, of the whole library, which is among the Gale MSS. at Trinity College, Cambridge. It bears no name of owner, but is easily seen to be Lumley’s. Not all the MSS. that we find bearing Lumley’s name are in it, and not all the MSS. in it are in the old Royal Library. To the second class belong the English Bible at Wolfenbuettel, the Bible of Gundulf, Bishop of Rochester (a fine but plain book which is at Cheltenham in the Phillipps collection), and the Bosworth Psalter bought not long ago from a private owner by the British Museum. The first class is more numerous; about twenty MSS. at Lambeth alone have Lumley’s name, but are not in his catalogue. I conjecture that they were presented by Lumley (who was a generous giver of printed books to the Universities) to Archbishop Bancroft when he was forming his collection.