University of Virginia Library

Harington's Supplie or Addicion to the Catalogue of Bishops: An Additional Manuscript
by
R. H. Miller

Attesting further to my earlier conclusion that Sir John Harington's A Supplie or Addicion to the Catalogue of Bishops, to the yeare 1608 was circulated more broadly in manuscript than had previously been realized, is the discovery of another manuscript of that work, which should be put in the company of the manuscripts that have already been identified.[1]

Trinity College Dublin MS. 806, ff. 141-175, contains a partial text of

the Supplie, from its beginning through the first paragraph of the account of Archbishop Edwin Sandys (pp. 33-161 of my edition).[2] It is titled erroneously "A Supplie or Addition to the Catalogue of Bishopps to the yeare 1618." The manuscript volume itself constitutes a collection of over forty miscellaneous items having to do with English and Irish affairs in the first half of the seventeenth century, in various hands. Contents are listed in the Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin, comp. T. K. Abbott (1900), pp. 133-135. According to the Library's records the manuscript was originally in the library of John Madden, M.D.[3] Madden's manuscript volumes came to the Library in a bequest from John Sterne, bishop of Clogher, in 1741 (Catalogue, pp. iii-iv, xv).

The manuscript is in a transitional hand of the early seventeenth century. Both the hand and the original owner remain to be identified. The first page of the manuscript, f. 141r, was used as a practice sheet by the scribe and is covered with many passages of legal phraseology and with two passages from the Supplie. In two places on the page is the statement "Iohn Saunders is the trew owner of this Book," in an italic hand different from that of the manuscript, laid over the original writing. Other names appearing on the page underlying the original scribal practisings are the names "Valentine Hawley" and "Christo: Blounte gent.", the latter appearing twice. Sir Christopher Blount, marshal of the army in Ireland under the Earl of Essex, was executed in 1601, six years before the Supplie was written. Harington had served in Ireland under Essex, as a captain of horse. The manuscript is very badly stained along its inner margins, making the process of transcription and collation difficult. Two folios have deteriorated almost completely (143-144).

Collation of this text establishes it to be related textually to B.L. Harl. MS 1220, ff. 134-248 (siglum H) and B.L. Sloane MS. 1675 (siglum S), but most closely to H. It is descended from the exemplar of H, since it varies sufficiently from H not to have served as its exemplar or to have descended from it. In the stemma produced in my earlier article, p. 158, it should be shown as a member of the H-S group. Since the hand is not Harington's and since it is not closely related textually to the fair-copy manuscript tradition of B.L. Royal MS 17 B xxii, it has little textual value, other than to indicate once again that the Supplie circulated in manuscript fairly widely before its posthumous publication in 1653.

Notes