 |
| Founded on Pilchards |
|
|
James Fenton
copyright © 2006
|
Originally published
in The Guardian
22 April 2006
|
The Bodleian Library has just reprinted the
autobiography of its great benefactor, Sir Thomas Bodley. This
is a short work, and it comes in a small format, which might
put you in mind of a thinking person's stocking-filler. It makes
a nice souvenir, and it is important because this is in some
sense the first English autobiography. That is to say, it is
the first, as William Clennell explains in his introduction,
"in which the subject's life is so narrated, within a rhetorical
framework, as to constitute an apologia, thus constituting a
new genre".
There is no surviving original manuscript,
but the life was clearly widely circulated in the period between
its composition in 1609 and its first publication in 1647. It
was written exactly two centuries before the first recorded
use of the word autobiography, so this "new genre"
had to wait patiently before being named.
It comes naturally to Bodley, born in 1544,
to make it plain in the first sentences that he comes from "worshipfull
parentage" on both sides, and that his father's is an "antient
Family". But he famously omits any mention of his wife,
the wealthy fish-merchant's widow Ann Ball, in deference to
whom it is often said that the Bodleian Library was founded
on pilchards.
This oversight was criticised very early on,
in a letter written in 1613, shortly after Bodley's death, by
one John Chamberlain: "He hath written his owne life in
seven sheetes of paper, and not leaving out the least minutezze,
or omitting nothing that might tend to his owne glorie or commendation,
he hath not so much as made mention of his wife or that he was
married, wherby you may see what a mind he carried, and what
account he made of his best benefactours."
No doubt this censure of Bodley's character
was well founded, but the passage also shows what a novelty
and what an act of immodesty writing one's own life must have
seemed to most of Bodley's contemporaries. Seven sheets of paper!
"Not leaving out the least minutezze," the least minutiae,
as if this were an act of phenomenal indiscretion.
Of course Bodley leaves out a great deal of
what one might expect. The story he tells is of a man brought
up in the Protestant circles of Calvin's Geneva, who comes to
England on the accession of Queen Elizabeth, has a distinguished
academic career at Oxford before becoming a diplomat and/or
secret agent. On which topic he remains secretive: "My
next employment was to Henry the third, at such time as he was
forced by the Duke of Guise to fly out of Paris; which I performed
in such sort, as I had in charge with extraordinary secrecy;
not being accompanied with any one servant (for so much was
I commanded) nor with any other Letters then such as were written
in the Queenes own hand, to the King, and some selected persons
about him; the effect of that message it is fit I should conceale."
This discretion covers a mission in 1588 to
deliver a letter to Henry III, at the time of the assassination
of the Duc de Guise, assuring the French king of Elizabeth's
support.
Such usefulness to the state was rewarded by
eight years as the queen's ambassador to the Netherlands. He
regularly reported to the Lord Treasurer, Lord Burghley. Unfortunately
he got into the habit of simultaneously reporting to the Earl
of Essex, Burghley's rival. When Essex recommended Bodley as
Secretary of State, suspicions were aroused. Burghley's camp
thought Bodley had behaved duplicitously. Feeling something
of a stain on his honour, he returned to England and to academic
life. The library became his great project.
No doubt there remained a sense that he would
not ensure his immortal fame without doing something to meet
the criticisms of his role as envoy. That is why this short
text is called an apologia. It does not tell us very much about
the library, but Bodley no doubt did not feel he needed to underline
that part of his achievement. Instead it puts the establishment
of the library in its context: this is what Bodley went on to
achieve, having already done the state some service. This then
is how one branch of autobiography begins: it is the case for
defence.
|
|
|
