 | |  |
Aside from a few brief accounts over the past three hundred years, there has been no complete history of the composition and promulgation of Sir John Harington's A Supplie or Addicion to the Catalogue of Bishops, to the Yeare 1608.[1] My recent discovery of two additional manuscripts of this most remarkable piece of church history and personal recollection makes the need for an accounting all the more compelling, particularly since one of these manuscripts contains textual material that has not appeared in print to date, and since it represents an earlier version of the text than has hitherto been known.
The Supplie was ostensibly in its conception and execution a private work, intended for the use of Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, son of King James I. It was written as a supplement to the first edition of Bishop Francis Godwin's A Catalogue of the Bishops of England (1601), one of the earliest church histories to treat of the lives of the bishops from the beginnings of the English Church to the early years of Elizabeth's reign. Godwin's Catalogue is a valuable history; it was well thought of in its own time and earned him a promotion from Subdean of Exeter Cathedral to Bishop of Llandaff, at that time an impoverished but still prestigious see. The work continued into another English edition, in 1615, and a Latin edition, De praesulibus Angliae commentarius, in 1616, both editions appearing after Harington's death, which occurred in 1612. In the Supplie
As a biographical continuation of Godwin's Catalogue, Harington's Supplie contains considerably amplified accounts of the bishops of Godwin's time (and Harington's), accounts which Godwin either chose to omit completely or to include, but in bare, factual prose, devoid of judgments and opinions that might be taken amiss by his own colleagues (see Catalogue [1601], sig. A4r). Harington's intention was to continue Godwin's basic plan but in a much livelier, more open vein, as only Sir John Harington could have done. As a result of Harington's almost conversational, recollective manner, the Supplie becomes a most entertaining and penetrating account of the bishops of the late Tudor-early Stuart period. As an historical document the Supplie is very important, and its insights into the attitudes of one of the most discerning of the Elizabethan courtiers have never been properly valued.[2] Only recently Robert McNulty touched on its worth when he called it "one of the most readable volumes of Church history ever written" (Introduction to Harington's translation of Orlando Furioso, ed. McNulty [1972], p. xxiv).
In keeping with the illustriousness of its recipient, Harington prepared a handsome manuscript of the Supplie, including both topical and alphabetical indexes to Godwin's work, as well as to his own, and had the complete manuscript bound in with a copy of the first edition of Godwin's Catalogue, which he then presented to the Prince.[3] This manuscript, described more fully below, is now B.M. Royal MS. 17 B XXII, denoted here by the siglum FC.
As nearly as can be ascertained, the work was composed in the latter part of 1607 and early 1608. The last page of the text of the Supplie in FC is dated "18. February. 1607 [OS]," in Harington's hand. In "The occasion why the former worke was taken in hand," a postscript appended by
His dating seems to be substantially correct, though a letter of his to Prince Henry would seem to indicate that he was at work on the Supplie as early as 1606. In a letter dated 1606 by Thomas Park, in NA3, I, 363, Harington writes to Prince Henry, "I here sende by my servant such matter as your Highness did covet to see, in regard to Bishop Gardener of Winchester, which I shall sometime more largely treat of and lay at your feet" (Letters and Epigrams, pp. 127, 405). The rest of the letter is composed almost verbatim of a section of Harington's account of Gardiner in the Supplie (NA3, II, 67-68). The letter was first published in Henry Harington's first edition of the Nugae (1769), I, 81, with the date "1609," and Park re-dated it "1606" in his edition, on the assumption that the "9" was a misprint for "6" since, presumably, Henry had already received the Supplie before 1609. To my knowledge no other evidence exists for the dating of this letter.
However, a sufficient number of pieces of internal evidence in six of the sections of the Supplie tend to support Harington's dating of his work. In the account of the bishopric of Lincoln, he refers to the wedding of James Hay, first Earl of Carlisle, that took place on 6 January 1607, which would put the writing of that section sometime afterward (NA3, II, 113; Cokayne, Complete Peerage, III, 32). Likewise on p. 69 of the manuscript he speaks of "Doctor Willim Chatterton now lyving" (NA3, II, 112, does not carry this heading). Chaderton, Bishop of Lincoln, died suddenly on 11 April 1608, just shortly after the date on which Harington states that he completed the Supplie, which would again place the writing of this passage
The earliest extant text of the Supplie is an incomplete manuscript copy in Harington's secretary hand; it is here designated the A MS., now B.M. Add. MS. 46370. Little is known about it, other than what is revealed by textual evidence. Its existence was not established until its discovery by Ruth Hughey, in 1933, among other manuscripts in the possession of the Harington family.[5] It remained in the family's keeping from the time of its writing until its sale to the British Museum in 1947, by Miss Philippa Harington.[6] It contains no date, although textual evidence indicates that it is the copy from which the fair-copy manuscript, B.M. Royal MS. 17 B XXII, or FC, was made.
The manuscript is a quarto volume bound in nineteenth-century quarter-calf with marbled paper boards and vellum corners, containing 68 leaves and measuring 183 x 136 mm. The paper is ruled in red margins throughout, with the first four leaves and the last four leaves of a later, somewhat
The A MS. lacks the following sections of the complete Supplie: Canterbury, London, Bath and Wells, the concluding section following the section on Chester, and "The occasion why the former worke was taken in hand," constituting pp. 3-54, 132-165, and 277-278 of the text in NA3, Vol. II. Parts of the sections of Winchester at the beginning of the manuscript and of Chester at the end were removed, but these sections were restored by the writer of the seventeenth-century cursive script of ff. 1v and 62. In the middle of the manuscript the whole section of Bath and Wells is missing, together with the last part of Salisbury (NA3, II, 131.2-8) and the first few lines of Exeter (NA3, II, 166.1-9). This missing section may have been used as setting copy for Henry Harington's 1769 edition of the Nugae, which contains only that part of the Supplie. Young Henry Harington gained a reputation for having mutilated manuscripts in preparing his editions and may have removed the leaves of the Bath and Wells section for that edition.[7]
As previously indicated, the manuscript is otherwise in Harington's secretary hand, with some material in italic. The hand shows variations, but they are not unusual and conform to variations in other manuscripts already accepted as autograph, for example, in B.M. Add. MSS. 12049, the Epigrams; 18920, the Orlando; 46368, the Metamorphosis of Ajax. The hand was first identified as Harington's by Ruth Hughey in her article, mentioned in n. 5, p. 402.
A is a copy made from an earlier draft, as there are a number of places in the manuscript where Harington mistakenly repeated parts of sentences and then crossed them out or in some cases missed his repetitions and let them stand (ff. 8r.13; 20v.1; 22v.8, 11; 45r.5-6, 11; 56r.27). In relation to the other manuscripts, A is the earliest manuscript. Since it was copied from an earlier draft and was the copy used in making FC, it can be dated
The fair-copy manuscript, FC, now in the Royal Manuscripts Collection in the British Museum, is in Harington's italic hand and is the latest autograph text of the Supplie. As noted previously, it is now catalogued as B.M. Royal MS. 17 B XXII, and carries the date "18. February. 1607 [OS]" in Harington's hand, on p. 178. The manuscript, bound in with a copy of the first edition of Francis Godwin's A Catalogue of the Bishops of England (1601), was presented to Prince Henry sometime after February of 1608. It immediately became a part of Henry's excellent library, and then was taken into the Royal Library on Henry's premature death.[8] It became a part of the British Museum's holdings when the Royal Library was turned over to that institution in the eighteenth century.
It is now bound in half brown morocco with linen cloth boards; according to the Museum's records the rebinding was done in 1966. It was originally bound in brown calf for Henry; the portion of the binding containing the arms of the Prince is now preserved on the front free endpaper at the beginning of the volume.[9] The manuscript measures 197 x 145 mm. It is erratically paged 1-45 [46-70], 1-7, 6-111, 114-187 [188-190], and folio numbers have been added in a later hand numbering 280-407, consecutively with Godwin's Catalogue. The printed text of Godwin's Catalogue was also given rubrished margins like those of the manuscript, and Harington added in his own hand corrections of typographical errors in the printed text, and marginal glosses and resumes. These glosses were added after Harington had completed his Supplie, as they contain cross references to it. Contents of the manuscript are as follows: pp. 1-44, topical index to Godwin's Catalogue, arranged by bishoprics; 45-[46], blank; [47-69], "A Table Alphabeticall annexed to the Booke of the Catalogue of Bishops"; [70], blank; 1-[179], "A Supplie or Addicion to the Catalogue of Bishops, to the yeare 1608," and on p. 178 the date of the work appears, "18. February. 1607 [OS]"; 180-187, "The occasion why the former worke was taken in hand"; [188-190], blank. Thus the manuscript consists of two parts: (1) the two indexes to Godwin's Catalogue and (2) the text of the Supplie. The handwriting is identical to that of the autograph manuscript of his Epigrams in the Folger Shakespeare Library, Fo, MS. V. a. 249, to Cambridge Add. MS. 337, a manuscript version of some epigrams appended to a printed copy of the Orlando Furioso, and to the examples of Harington's italic script within the various manuscripts in his secretary hand, most
Collation shows that FC was copied from A. In FC, p. 165.14-15, Harington, in copying, slipped over a complete single line of A (f. 56r.10) and omitted it from FC. All corrections of the text in A are consistently incorporated in FC, and readings that are clearly errors in A are corrected in FC. There are 260 substantive variants between the two manuscripts, but none of them is extensive; most reflect the fact that in preparing the fair copy, Harington took the opportunity to polish the text as he copied. FC is textually unique, since it is the autograph fair-copy manuscript, representing Harington's final intentions. None of the other texts can rival its authority. Data on substantive variants between FC and other texts is given in Appendix II.
Two manuscripts of obscure origin, neither one holograph, have not as yet been noted in print. B.M. Harl. MS. 1220, ff. 134-248, constitutes a full and unique text of the Supplie, the individual leaves being collected and bound into a large volume of miscellaneous historical material from the seventeenth century. A Catalogue of the Harleian Manuscripts in the British Museum (1808), II, 608, is vague as to the origin of this manuscript. C. E. Wright, Fontes Harleiani (1972), pp. 80, 393, traces the manuscript volume no farther than the Harley library at Brampton Bryan, the family residence. The text is in two different hands. The first section, comprising about one-fourth of the text, consists of ff. 134-168, in a mid-seventeenth-century secretary hand, on laid paper, measuring 310 x 200 mm. In the same hand a title-page is given on f. 134r of this section: "[in roman script] A Supply or an Addition to | the Catalogue of Bishops | to the yeare M. DC. VIIJ." Written directly below the title, in a hand identified in the Catalogue of the Harleian Manuscripts as that of Robert Harley himself, is the following note: "By Sr John Harrington | written for the service | of Prince Henry and | Printed in smal octavo | 16[blank]." Ff. 134-168r include the sections on Canterbury, London, Winchester, and the beginning seven lines on Ely, which are repeated in the opening of the second section. Following f. 168v, which is blank except for the running title "Martin Heaton," is an unnumbered blank leaf.
The second section, ff. 169-248, begins with the section on Ely and contains the remaining three-fourths of the text of the Supplie, complete. Of particular significance, however, are the additional eight pages of the
The additional section of the "occasion," ff. 245-248, was undoubtedly part of Harington's original version, which he excised before preparing FC for Prince Henry. In FC, p. 185.7, Harington indicates his intention to continue the "occasion" with a fuller discussion of the matter of episcopacy in an added chapter: ". . . that [the Christian religion] hath beene preserved and continued with Bishops, and that it will fall and decay without Bishops, as in ['the next Chapter' del.] *some other tretis [interl.] I will god willing more speacially prove." As indicated, in FC the phrase "the next Chapter" has been cancelled and the phrase "some other tretis" written above it in Harington's hand. The H MS. carries the original reading, "the next chapter," on f. 243v. Apparently Harington had plans for a fuller religious treatise than the one he presented to Prince Henry. It is clear from the copyist's note at the end of H, f. 248v, "desunt reliqua," that the manuscript from which H was copied must itself have been incomplete. Since the "occasion" is lacking in all other texts but H, FC, and NA3, it is difficult to know precisely when or how the excision was made or to know how much material may have been excised. The text of this new section is provided in Appendix III.
The last manuscript located to date is B.M. Sloane MS. 1675, a quarto volume in an eighteenth-century binding of brown calf with a red spine tooled in gold, measuring 212 x 154 mm. The front and back boards contain the Sloane arms within a gold triple-rule frame. Endpapers are marbled. The pages have been trimmed so that the original manuscript foliations have been cut away from the earlier pages. The manuscript contains two sets of numbers, foliation appearing on rectos in red ink, and pagination on versos in black. At the top of f. 1r is the title: "A Supplie or an Addition to the | Catalogue of Byshops to the yeare | 1608." The text follows, ff. 1-71, with f. 72 blank. It contains the text of the Supplie proper but lacks "The occasion why the former worke was taken in hand." The hand, which is consistent throughout, is mid- to late-seventeenth-century cursive, the writing a bit rough and hurried, with frequent mistakes and numerous misreadings. According to A Catalogue of the Manuscripts Preserved in the British Museum, Hitherto Undescribed . . ., ed. Samuel Ayscough (1782), s.v. Sloane MS. 1675, this manuscript came from the library of Moses Pitt, the seventeenth-century printer, though no information as to its earlier history is given. B.M. Sloane MS. 1674, a catalogue of Pitt's books, contains no record of it, and the more recent Index to the
Collation of these two manuscripts with the other texts, manuscript and printed, and the existence within H, ff. 245-248, of textual matter not present in any other text, show clearly that they both descend from some manuscript text of a different origin from A. They differ markedly in their readings from the other texts, and though they share a large number of readings, the considerable number of variants between them, 1166 in total, and the absence of the expanded "occasion" from S indicate that the latter, S, is not descended from the earlier, H. On the other hand, their relationship cannot be disputed. FC disagrees with shared substantive readings in H and S in 876 instances; no other combination of texts shares such a high number of variants from FC. It is rivaled only by BV-NA2, which shares 604 variants from FC. Though H and S are most closely related, S is definitely far removed from all texts, because of its manifold errors, as the data below indicate:
- H-FC 1453
- H-A 1550
- H-S 1166
- H-BV 1842
- H-NA1 [*] 298
- H-NA2 1901
- H-NA3 1497
- S-FC 1543
- S-A 1654
- S-H 1166
- S-BV 1891
- S-NA1 [*] 274
- S-NA2 1943
- S-NA3 1600
Substantive Variants: H, S, and Other Texts
At Harington's death in 1612 the Supplie still remained for all purposes a relatively private work, a "courtly" history, seen only by a few. It was not until 1653 that John Chetwind, a presbyterian grandson of Harington's, had the history published in duodecimo under the title, A Briefe View of the State of the Church of England, and consequently gave it its widest audience.[11] It is rather shocking to know that the conservative Harington, an Anglican with Catholic proclivities, would ultimately have his anti-puritan history brought before the public by a presbyterian grandson, and this peculiar circumstance has affected the judgment that has been made of the Supplie ever since.
Chetwind was the son of Dr. Edward Chetwind, chaplain to Queen Anne and the Dean of Bristol Cathedral, and of Helena Harington Chetwind, Sir John's eldest daughter. He was born at Banwell, Somerset, on 4 January 1623, was educated at Oxford, and, according to Alsager Vian's account of him in the DNB (s.v. Chetwynd), "threw in his lot with the presbyterians, seemingly at the instigation of his uncle John Harington [Sir John's eldest son]." Harington's namesake had deserted his father's position and turned parliamentarian, in spite of his father's views on monarchy and episcopacy. Perhaps like other Haringtons in the past, especially his own father, he noticed the changing winds. In any case the grandson Chetwind continued a presbyterian and during the Interregnum held the position of joint-pastor of St. Cuthbert's parish in Wells. F. J. Poynton tells us that he preached the funeral sermon of Rev. Samuel Cooke at Wrington Church, Wells, on 12 August 1652, and that his views "inclined to the Puritans."[12] It was during this time, in 1653, that he published the Supplie, at a time in his life when, according to Wood, he was "no friend to the church of England" (Athenae, IV, 376).
Chetwind may have come into possession of a manuscript of the Supplie through his uncle John Harington.[13] Sir John's own death preceded Chetwind's birth by eleven years, so a copy could not have come to him directly. He and his uncle were apparently inclined to similar religious attitudes and got along well together. Their friendship is attested to by John Harington's diary, B.M. Add. MS. 10114, kept by him from 31 March 1646 to about Christmas 1653, in which Harington mentions having Chetwind to dinner on occasion and attending his sermons, though he makes no mention of the Supplie.
As far as can be determined, if we can judge from the number of extant copies of the Briefe View (it is more accessible than the eighteenth-century editions of the Nugae Antiquae), the work was very popular and gained a much undeserved reputation as a good anti-episcopal tract. Anthony à Wood, in his account of Francis Godwin, is the first to comment: "But so it was, that the book coming into the hands of one John Chetwind, (Grandson by a daughter to the author,) a person deeply principled in presbyterian tenants, did, when the Press was open, print it at London 1653 in oct. And no sooner was it published, and came to the hands of many, but t'was exceedingly clamour'd at by the Loyal and orthodox clergy, condemning him much that published it . . . yet it was exceedingly pleasing to the Presbyterians and other Dissenters" (Athenae, II, 557).
The text of this edition lacks the last twelve lines of the conclusion (NA3, II, 278.1-12) and "The occasion why the former worke was taken in
Chetwind's edition is descended from A; of all the manuscript texts available, this particular text resembles the printed book most closely. However, it is clear that A did not serve as actual copy for this edition, since A is free of printer's marks, and since BV contains thirty-seven substantive readings found in the other manuscripts but not found in A. The readings appear in the last five sections of the Supplie; they are minor and are largely corrections of errors in A. For example, at two places in A, lacunae exist (30v.24-25 and 33v.8), which are completed in FC and H, the other two manuscripts that predate BV. The perfected readings appear also in BV, which indicates that Chetwind used a text that was close to A but more complete, or that he himself made a transcript of A, which was then corrected through comparison of it with some other text. Two extensive readings in BV have no source in any extant manuscript. At the beginning of the account of John White of Winchester, p. 59, BV reads, "He was born of a worshipfull house, and in the Diocess of Winchester, and became after Warden of Winchester, thence for his great learning and vertuous life prefer'd to the Bishoprick of Lincoln, and after upon the death of Stephen Gardner made Bishop of Winchester; wherefore of him I may say and so would all men say (how contrary soever to him in religion . . ." For the same opening, the manuscripts agree, reading simply, "Of him I may say . . ." In the account of Lancelot Andrewes, BV, p. 141, a lacuna existing in both A and FC is perfected in BV with the insertion, "born in London, and trained up in the School of that famous Mulcaster." H and S contain neither the lacuna nor the reading. These readings may have been inserted by Chetwind himself, or they may have come from a text available to Chetwind at the time.
Of all the printed editions, BV is the one most responsible for substantive textual changes, since it introduces readings that become perpetuated in the Henry Harington editions of the Nugae Antiquae of 1769 and 1779 and the second issue of the latter edition in 1792. Some errors were corrected in the two editions (1769, 1779), but many went uncorrected until Thomas Park's edition of the Nugae in 1804.
In 1769 the first volume of the first edition of the Nugae Antiquae was published by Henry Harington, the son of Dr. Henry Harington of Bath. This edition is referred to as NAI. It contains only the section of Bath and Wells, published in the form of a letter from Sir John to Prince Henry, which occupies pp. 5-27 of the first volume of that edition; the second volume did not appear until 1775.
Since the section on Bath and Wells is missing from A, it is possible that NAI was set directly from leaves of the manuscript, which were
A subsequent edition of the Nugae appeared in 1779, also edited by Henry Harington, in three volumes; it contains the full BV text of the Supplie in Vol. I, pp. 1-246. Text is hereafter cited as NA2. This edition contains the second complete printed text, and collation shows that it was set from a copy of BV. In addition to containing the errors and omissions of BV, it introduces new readings and new errors, so that of the three printed editions of the complete Supplie it is the least authoritative. Unfortunately, the perpetuation of its faulty text has now been facilitated by a photo-reproduced facsimile issued in 1968 by Georg Olms Verlagsbuch-handlung of Hildesheim, Germany, No. 14 in its Anglistica & Americana series.
What has been thought to have been a new edition of the Nugae appeared in 1792, in three volumes, but an examination of the Folger copy of this date and a comparison of it with a copy of the 1779 edition establishes that it is a new issue made up of remainder sheets of the 1779 edition with a cancel title-page bearing the 1792 date. The preliminaries of the first volume of this copy of the 1792 issue are arranged so that the dedication to the Bishop of Bath appears before the account of Sir John Harington, the anecdote on the repairing of the church, and the short poem, whereas in the 1779 edition, it follows them. Otherwise the 1792 issue is identical to the 1779 edition and therefore has no new bearing on the text of the Supplie.
The most recent edition of the Nugae appeared in 1804 in two volumes, edited by Thomas Park; it contains the entire Supplie in Volume II, pp. 1-278. Park's edition is textually unique in that, as he states in Vol. I, pp. xx-xxi, his edition was set from FC and is the only printed edition to date to use the fair-copy manuscript as its copy-text. As a result it is more authoritative than any previous printed edition. Park's editorial principles, however, were inconsistent. He abandoned Harington's fairly regular practice of punctuation and spelling and substituted his own, a system that is less consistent, more complicated, and less clear than Harington's. In eighty-six places in the text, he chose to emend FC freely with substantive readings from BV, where those readings seemed better, to his judgment. Marginal notations by Harington were taken over by Park and used as editorial footnotes to the text. Throughout both A and FC there are lacunae in the text which Harington intended to fill but never did, spaces which usually were meant to contain Latin or Greek quotes or factual
The publication of Park's edition brings to a close the history of the dissemination of A Supplie or Addicion to the Catalogue of Bishops, to the Yeare 1608. Given the recent discovery of two manuscripts of this work, it is quite possible that others, more secluded, may surface. The prevalence of manuscripts and the survival of a large number of copies of the 1653 Briefe View attest to the popularity of Harington's survey of bishops. Further, the discovery of the eight pages of additional text in H provides us with an important addition to the Harington canon, one that confirms even more explicitly the strong pro-episcopal stance that Harington maintained throughout his life. Unfortunately, the recent re-issue by the AMS Press of Park's inadequate text of the Supplie in NA3 will probably impede the publication of a critical edition of this work in the near future, even though the discovery and examination of the autograph A MS., and of the H MS., now allow us to make some improvements in the text.[16]
| | |