Роберт Коттон: Англиялық антиквар және кітапхананың негізін қалаушы

English antiquarian (d. 1631)

Sir Robert Bruce Cotton, 1st Baronet (22 January 1570/71 – 6 May 1631) of Conington Hall in the parish of Conington in Huntingdonshire, England, was a Member of Parliament and an antiquarian who founded the Cotton library.

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. 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.

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 rivalled, then surpassed, the royal manuscript collections.

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.

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).

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. 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).

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)