Samuel Pepys, William Hewer & Ogilby's Bible

On 23 February, I wrote about a copy of Richard Knolles's Turkish History (London, 1687) owned and inscribed by Samuel Pepys (1633‒1703) to highlight the 380th anniversary of the great book collector's birth. 2013 also marks the 310th anniversary of Pepys's death on 26 May 1703. To note the occasion, this week's post describes a second book from the Dunedin City Library's Heritage Collections associated with (but not owned by) Pepys.

Pepys's Final Years

The Dunedin copy of Knolles's Turkish History was inscribed by Pepys sometime in the latter half of 1690 after his brief imprisonment on suspicions of Jacobitism. Eleven years later, he retired from public life and left London for a house in Clapham Common, Surrey. Pepys spent the remaining years of his life there, living with his trusted friend and fellow naval administrator, William Hewer (1642–1715) (Pepys's wife Elisabeth died in 1669). Hewer, who was appointed executor of Pepys's will, was once one of his menservants and is mentioned numerous times in Pepys's diary. Pepys's renowned library (now at Magdalene College, Cambridge) was kept in Hewer's home from 1703 to 1724.

1660 Cambridge Bible

The Heritage Collections holds a book from Hewer's personal library, which was widely dispersed after his death. It is a copy of the 1660 Cambridge Bible in folio, printed for John Field and illustrated by John Ogilby ( ESTC R17044). The edition ‘marked the beginning of illustrated Bibles for the high end of the market .… Ogilby first presented a copy to the House of Commons, then extracted a payment of ₤50 for it’ (Van Eerde 46). The engraved title-page of Solomon enthroned is 'blatantly … royalist, for it is difficult not to see the long-haired king as Charles II, and the twelve small lions as twelve apostolic spaniels’ (Norton 148).

The 1660 Cambridge Bible is noted in Pepys’s diary (27 May 1667): 

‘There come also Richardson, the bookbinder, with one of Ogilby’s bibles in quires for me to see and buy, it being Mr. Cade’s, my stationer’s; but it is like to be so big that I shall not use it, it being too great to stir up and down without much trouble, which I shall not like nor do intend it for’ (8:237–8). Indeed, no copy is recorded in the Pepys Library catalogue.

Could the Dunedin copy of the 1660 Cambridge Bible be the very one mentioned in the diary, passed up by Pepys, but bought by Hewer? 

Hewer's bookplate, found on the verso of the title-page of the 1660
Book of Common Prayer (issued with the Bible; ESTC R31275)*

It is impossible to know for certain without documentary evidence, but the idea is at least plausible. The large folio was expensive, possibly as much as £25 when published, even in sheets, which would have normally put the book out of reach for a clerk like Hewer earning £30 per annum.

Hewer, however, was not limited by his salary. According to Robert Latham, Hewer may have inherited money from his father, who died in 1665 (Diary, 10:183). His uncle, Robert Blackborne (d.1701), became secretary to the East India Company in December 1666 (ODNB), and Hewer amassed a large fortune built on trade as a result. His gift in January 1668 of a diamond necklace to Elisabeth Pepys worth £40 is evidence enough that the Bible was far from being beyond his means in 1667 (10:183).

Provenance Continued...
Hewer died in 1715. Much of his property, including the house and contents in Clapham Common, passed to his godson, who died without issue in 1728.

Hewer's books were sold in April 1730, along with the libraries of Thomas Hobart M.D. and the Reverend John Hancocke, prebendary of Canterbury. While the auction catalogue records a copy of the 1660 Cambridge Bible bound in three volumes with the capital letters illuminated (lot 1178), this description does not match the Dunedin copy, which is bound in two volumes with plain capital letters. It is presumed that the three-volume Bible belonged to either Hobart or Hancocke (the catalogue does not specify the former owners of each lot), and that the two-volume Hewer copy was sold or given as a gift before the sale.

Though the immediate owner after Hewer remains unknown, the Bible did not travel far from its Surrey home. Both volumes include the bookplate of William Brightwell Sumner (1728–1796), a member of the East India Company, who purchased Hatchlands Park, Surrey, from the literary hostess and member of the Bluestockings, Frances Boscawen (1719–1809) in 1770.

Further provenance evidence is sadly lacking until the twentieth century, when the Bible was acquired by Sir Alfred Reed and donated by him to the Dunedin Public Library in 1950. The date and source of acquisition have gone unrecorded. 

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** Hewer's bookplate was only the second bookpile bookplate designed in 1699. The other was for Sir Philip Sydenham, 3rd Baronet (1676–1739), whose own plate was based on a 1698 bookpile bookplate designed by Pepys for Arthur Charlett, Master of University College, Oxford. See Brian North Lee's 'Gentlemen and Their Book-plates' in Property of a Gentleman: The Formation, Organisation and Dispersal of the Private Library 1620–1920 edited by Robin Myers and Michael Harris (Winchester, England: St. Paul Bibliographies; New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 1996): 42–76.

References
Robert Latham (gen. ed.). Catalogue of the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge, 6 vols. (Cambridge, England: D. S. Brewer; Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1978–1987: 1:14–17 (Bibles).  

Robert Latham and William Matthews (eds.). The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 11 vols. (London: G. Bell and Sons Ltd, 1970–1983). 

Katherine S. Van Eerde. John Ogilby and the Taste of his Times (Folkenstone: Dawson, 1976). Cited in David Norton, The King James Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 148.

David Norton. The King James Bible: A Short History from Tyndale to Today. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Happy Birthday, Mr Pepys

Portrait by John Hayls, 1666
National Portrait Gallery, London

Today's date marks the 380th birthday anniversary of famed diarist, naval officer, and bibliophile Samuel Pepys (1633‒1703).

Pepys's carefully arranged and indexed library included incunabula, medieval manuscripts, naval records, contemporary publications, over 1,800 printed ballads and, most importantly, the six manuscript volumes of his personal diary. In addition, Pepys also collected maps and atlases, music, prints, and calligraphy.

After the death of his nephew and heir, John Jackson, in 1723, Pepys's library was transferred to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where it is housed in its twelve original oak bookcases. The collection remains one of the most important surviving seventeenth-century private libraries held by an institution today.

The Heritage Collections, Dunedin City Library, is fortunate to own a book inscribed by Pepys late in life. It is a copy of the sixth edition of Richard Knolles's The Turkish History, from the Original of that Nation to the Growth of the Ottoman Empire (London, 1687; ESTC R179506).

According to the inscription, Pepys presented this copy of Knolles's Turkish History to Thomas Thoroton as a gift in 1690. 'Armig' is an abbreviation of 'Armiger' ‒ one entitled to wear a coat of arms. The remaining words signify Pepys's role as Secretary to the Admiralty during the reigns of Charles II and James II.

Thomas Thoroton (1663‒1721) was a barrister of the Middle Temple, the son of a citizen and salter of London and, at the time he came into possession of the book, about twenty-seven years of age. Thoroton's bookplate is found on the verso of the title-page.

Dr Richard Luckett, who recently retired as Pepys Librarian, informed me by email that the fact of the gift is particularly interesting as other evidence for the friendship between Pepys and Thoroton is lacking (though Thoroton was a close friend of Pepys's intimate friend, the antiquary Thomas Gale, Dean of York).

The reason behind the gift remains unknown. There is a copy of Knolles's Turkish History in the Pepys Library (PL 2739), so Pepys may have found himself in possession of a second copy and thought it a fitting gift for Thoroton. One possibility is that the young lawyer offered legal advice during Pepys's brief period of imprisonment in mid-1690 on suspicions of treason (Pepys was imprisoned in June, released in July, and completely vindicated in October), and presented the book as a mark of his esteem. Though the year of Pepys's imprisonment corresponds with the date of the inscription, without any documentary evidence this hypothesis remains pure speculation on my part.

2013 also marks the 310th anniversary of Pepys's death on 26 May 1703.

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The Dunedin copy of Knolles's Turkish History was purchased by Sir Alfred Hamish Reed (1875‒1975) from Thomas Thorp, Guildford, in February 1926, and was included in his 1948 Deed of Gift to the Dunedin Public Library.

For details on Pepys's library, see E. Gordon Duff's Bibliotheca Pepysiana, 4 vols. (London, 1914‒), reissued by Cambridge University Press in 2009.