Note 10 — Chapter II · THE FOUNDER OF THE COTTONIAN LIBRARY.

On this point, it is my wish to leave the reader to form his own estimate of probabilities. Probabilities, only, are attainable; and I have no side to take, in any attempt to weigh them. But it may be well to ask the reader’s attention to a passage in the Diary of a contemporary of Sir R. Cotton, a man of high character, and one who sat by Cotton’s side in Parliament, fighting with him for the liberties of England, during many years; one who is also remarkable for speaking about the faults of his friends with abundant candour. ‘Sir Robert Cotton, being highly esteemed by the Earl of Somerset, ... was acquainted with this murder [of Overbury] by him, a little before it now came to light, and had advised him what he took to be the best course for his safety.’ This passage occurs in the private diary of Sir Symonds D’Ewes—‘a man,’ says a great writer, ‘of somewhat Grandisonian ways,’ a man of ‘scrupulous Puritan integrity, of high flown conscientiousness, ... ambitious to be the pink of Christian country gentlemen,’ (Carlyle’s Essays, iv, 297.) This ‘scrupulous Puritan’ knew all that was current about the terrible ‘Great Oyer of Poisoning,’ as Sir Edward Coke called it. He lived in familiar intercourse with Cotton, and regarded their long acquaintance as an honour to himself; whilst speaking freely about certain social habits and limitations—neither Grandisonian or Puritanic—on Cotton’s part, as precluding their intercourse from ripening into that close friendship which such a man as D’Ewes could form only with men likeminded with himself on the highest interests of humanity. Is it not easy to infer—and is not the inference also inevitable—that by the fact of Somerset ‘acquainting Cotton with the murder of Overbury a little before’ it became public, and advising him as to ‘the course for his safety,’ D’Ewes understood such a communication and such advice as are entirely compatible with Somerset’s innocence of his wife’s crime?