Blair Worden - A Book of Friendship

BLAIR WORDEN - A BOOK OF FRIENDSHIP

that it is not a careless copy of that pamphlet. It cannot be a version of the Milton manuscript from which it differs fundamentally. 22 I would suggest that it is not created from the Spittlehouse pamphlet. What is less certain is whether there was a common source, or whether they are based on two close but far from identical separate scribal versions. Happily we can make some progress by discovering when, how, and why the King’s Inn MS came into being. The King’s Inn volumes of extracts from parliamentary journals 1653-87 contain two clues as to provenance. We know that the volumes were in the possession of Christopher Robinson when he died in 1787. 23 His signature is in the volume that concerns us here, covering the period July 1653 to March 1660. In one of the other adjacent volumes his name recurs with the date 1737, which we can reasonably assume is when he acquired them. More importantly two of the volumes, including the last volume of the Commons Journal series, contains a coat of arms belonging to Hugh Cholmondeley, 2nd viscount Kells in the Irish peerage (from the death of his father in 1681), and in his own right, from 1689, 1st baron Cholmondeley in the English peerage. 24 On becoming the first earl in 1706, his coat of arms changed. He was born in 1662, died in 1724, and was succeeded by his younger brother George who died in 1731, and that George by his own spendthrift son George. Neither Hugh nor his father was ever a member of the House of Commons, but Hugh was a member of the House of Lords from 1689 and became prominent as a Whig politician, being sworn in as a Privy Councillor in March 1706 and serving as Comptroller (and later Treasurer) of the Queen’s Household from 1708. This helps to explain the pattern of matters he selected to be included in the volumes of extracts from the Journals he acquired. The extravagance of Hugh’s successors nearly drove them to bankruptcy and their main home to ruin, which probably explains the 1737 sale of things of interest only to him. 25 Perhaps they were kept in the County Meath house and thus passed more readily to an Irish purchaser.

22 Where the Milton and Spittlehouse versions differ, King’s Inn follows the latter far more frequently especially on the nature of the chiliastic language in the second half and the sentence structures are consistently different. 23 For whom see C.J.Woods, ‘Robinson, Christopher (1712?-87), Judge’, Dictionary of Irish Biography , 9 vols (2009), 8:533. 24 For whom, see, T. F. Henderson revised by Philip Carter ‘Cholmondeley, Hugh, first earl of Cholmondeley (1662?- 1725)’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (60, vols., 2004) 11:508. 25 There is relevant matter in the genealogy on the wall of the Cholmondeley vault in St Oswald’s Church in Malpas, Cheshire. It also contains the relevant coat of arms, identical in its content to the plate in the King’s Inn MS.

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