Sir Robert Cotton, 1st Baronet, of Connington

Sir Robert Cotton was born on 22 January 1571 in Denton, Huntingdonshire, the son and heir of Thomas Cotton (1544–1592) of Conington (son of Thomas Cotton of Conington, Sheriff of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire in 1547.) by his first wife, Elizabeth Shirley, a daughter of Francis Shirley of Staunton Harold, Leicestershire. The Cotton family originated at the manor of Cotton, Cheshire, from where they took their surname. They were prominent in Shropshire by the 16th century with centres of power at Alkington and Norton in Hales where a member of the family, Rowland Cotton, gave one of the first architectural commissions to Inigo Jones. The family was close to polymath and antiquarian Sir Rowland Hill, publisher of the Geneva Bible. ==Education==

Cotton was educated at King's School, Peterborough and Westminster School where he was a pupil of the antiquarian William Camden, under whose influence he began to study antiquarian topics. He began collecting rare manuscripts as well as collecting notes on the history of Huntingdonshire when he was seventeen. He proceeded to Jesus College, Cambridge, where he graduated BA in 1585 and in 1589 entered the Middle Temple to study law. He began to amass a library in which the documents and manuscripts rivalled, then surpassed, the royal manuscript collections. One of the most valuable documents he collected is the Lindisfarne Gospels. ==Career==

Cotton was elected a Member of Parliament for Newtown, Isle of Wight in 1601 and as Knight of the Shire for Huntingdonshire in 1604. He helped to devise the institution of the title of baronet as a means for King James I to raise funds: like a peerage, a baronetcy was heritable but, like a knighthood, it gave the holder no seat in the House of Lords. One of his scarce monographs, Twenty-Four Arguments, proposed the bolstering of royal powers to suppress Catholic elements in England in the wake of the Popery Act 1627. His public anti-Catholicism brought him short-lived favour with the king. Despite this early period of goodwill with King James I, his approach to public life, based on his immersion in the study of old documents, was essentially based on that "sacred obligation of the king to put his trust in parliaments" which in 1628 was expressed in his monograph The Dangers wherein the Kingdom now Standeth, and the Remedye. From the Court party's point of view, this was anti-royalist in nature, and the king's ministers began to fear the uses being made of Cotton's library to support pro-parliamentarian arguments. Thus it was confiscated in 1630 and returned only after his death to his heirs. ==Role in Parliament==

in the British Museum Cotton supported the claim of King James VI of Scotland to succeed Queen Elizabeth I on the English throne, and after the queen's death was commissioned to write a work defending James's claim to the throne, for which he was rewarded with a knighthood in 1603. Cotton was elected to Parliament for Huntingdonshire in 1604, a constituency previously represented by his grandfather, Thomas Cotton. Cotton worked on the Committee on Grievances and in 1605–06 received the Bill pertaining to the Gunpowder Plot through his work on the Committee of Privileges. In 1607 he was reappointed to the Committee of Privileges. Cotton was appointed to the joint conference with the House of Lords during his work on the bill pertaining to the full union between Scotland and England in 1606–07. In 1610, Cotton was nominated in first place to the Committee of Privileges. In 1610/11 the royal revenues were low, and Cotton wrote Means for raising the king’s estate in which he suggested the formation of the baronetcy, a new order of social rank, higher than the knight but lower than the baron. Cotton was not elected to the 1614 Parliament. In 1621, Cotton advised James I on the impeachment of Sir Francis Bacon concerning the respective roles of the king and Parliament. In 1624, Cotton was elected to represent Old Sarum after the previous member, Sir Arthur Ingram, decided to sit for York. He was subsequently elected to Parliament for Thetford (1625) and Castle Rising (1628). ==Society of Antiquaries==

Cotton reunited with his former schoolmaster William Camden in the late 1580s as an early member of the Society of Antiquaries. Camden was one of the greatest early antiquarians, whose 1586 work Britannia was a chorographical (topographical and historical) survey of Britain. Cotton exerted little influence in the society until after his father's death in 1592. In 1593, he was resident at the family seat of Conington Castle, which he rebuilt. He returned to London in 1598 and revived the Society and petitioned for a permanent academy for antiquarian studies, suggesting that Cotton's collection of manuscripts be combined with the Queen's library to form a national library. The plan did not receive royal approval. The discussion of the Society in the summer of 1600 focused on ancient burial customs, probably the result of a recent visit to Hadrian's Wall by Camden and Cotton during which they collected Roman coins, monuments and fossils. The trip appears to have initiated Cotton's interest in Roman artefacts. The antiquarians Reginald Bainbridge and Lord William Howard offered Cotton Roman stones while the Essex antiquarian John Barkham arranged to send him Roman relics. Cotton's antiquarian studies influenced many people of his time and he was often sought after by other antiquarians for ideas. Below is a letter written by fellow antiquarian Roger Dodsworth to Cotton: The last recorded meeting of the Society of Antiquaries was in 1607. Cotton, however, continued collecting. ==Marriage and progeny==

As a young man, Cotton may have contracted a (possibly irregular) marriage with Frideswide Faunt, daughter of William Faunt of Foston, Leicestershire, and sister of the Jesuit theologian Arthur Faunt. The marriage was recorded by William Burton, Frideswide's nephew, but is not mentioned in Cotton's own papers. In about 1593 (the precise date is not known), he married Elizabeth Brocas, the daughter of William Brocas of Theddingworth in Leicestershire. This marriage took place about a year after the death of Cotton's father, and helped to shore up his financial position, as Elizabeth was an heiress. Their subsequent marital history suggests that perhaps these factors outweighed personal compatibility. By Elizabeth, Cotton had a son: Sir Thomas Cotton, 2nd Baronet (1594–1662). Sir Thomas in turn married Margaret Howard, by whom he had a son, Sir John Cotton (born 1621). ==Library==

The Cotton library was the richest private collection of manuscripts ever amassed. Of secular libraries, it outranked the Royal Library, the collections of the Inns of Court and the College of Arms. Cotton's collection included several rare and old texts, including the original codex bound manuscript of Beowulf, written around the year 1000; the Lindisfarne Gospels, written in the 7th or 8th century; and the Codex Alexandrinus, a 5th-century manuscript of the Greek Bible. Cotton's house near the Palace of Westminster became the meeting-place of the Society of Antiquaries of London and of all the eminent scholars of England. The library was eventually donated to the nation by Cotton's grandson and is now housed in the British Library. The physical arrangement of Cotton's library continues to be reflected in citations to manuscripts formerly in his possession. His library was housed in a room long by six feet wide filled with bookpresses, each surmounted by the bust of a figure from classical antiquity. Counterclockwise, these were catalogued as Julius, Augustus, Cleopatra, Faustina, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian. (Domitian had only one shelf, perhaps because it was over the door). Manuscripts are today designated by library, bookpress, and number: for example, the manuscript of Beowulf is designated Cotton Vitellius A.xv, and the manuscript of Pearl is Cotton Nero A.x. ==Role of family on the Cotton library==

Sir Robert Cotton began developing the works and manuscripts into a collection for his library shortly after the birth of his son in 1594. and also in London; his wife and son remained in the country. After another hiccup with the government, Sir Robert Cotton was forced to close the library by Charles I because the content within the library was believed to be harmful to the interests of the Royalists in 1629. If the library had not been sold to the nation, despite the wish of his grandfather Sir Robert Cotton, the library would have been taken over and inherited by Sir John Cotton's two grandsons, who, unlike the rest of the college-educated Cotton family, had been illiterate and put the library at risk of getting broken up and sold to different divisions within the family. Selected manuscripts '' • Cotton Julius A.x Old English Martyrology • Cotton Augustus II.106 Magna Carta: Exemplification of 1215 • Cotton Cleopatra A.ii Life of St Modwenna • Cotton Faustina A.x ''Additional Glosses to the Glossary in Ælfric's Grammar'' • Cotton Tiberius B.v Labours of the Months • Cotton Caligula A.ii "A Pistil of Susan" (frag.) • Cotton Claudius B.iv Genesis • Cotton Nero A.x. Pearl, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight • Cotton Nero D.iv Lindisfarne Gospels • Cotton Galba A.xviii Athelstan Psalter • Cotton Otho C.i Ælfric's De creatore et creatura • Cotton Vitellius A.xv Beowulf, Judith • Cotton Vespasian D.xiv Ælfric's De duodecim abusivis • Cotton Titus D.xxvi ''Ælfwine's Prayerbook'' • Cotton Domitian A.viii Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (version E) ==See also==