Note 7 — Chapter II · THE FOUNDER OF THE COTTONIAN LIBRARY.

Mr. S. R. Gardiner. His account is contained in the able paper entitled On Certain Letters of the Count of Gondomar giving an Account of the Affair of the Earl of Somerset, read to the Society of Antiquaries in 1867. Comp. the same historian’s Prince Charles and the Spanish Marriage (Vol. I, c. 1, and especially the passage beginning ‘Sarmiento was surprised by a visit from Sir Robert Cotton,’ and so on). In these pages I use Sarmiento’s subsequent title of ‘Gondomar,’ simply because English readers are more familiar with it than with the Spaniard’s family name. Mr. Gardiner needlessly deepens the stain on Cotton’s memory, arising—all allowance duly made—out of this intercourse with Gondomar, by the remark that ‘twenty months before’ the interview occurred, Sir Robert had ‘argued his case’ [i. e. a tract on the question of the right treatment, by the State, of Romanist priests and recusants] ‘from a decidedly Protestant point of view, and had taken care to put himself forward as a thorough, if not an extreme, Protestant.’ But, unfortunately for Mr. Gardiner’s trenchant conclusion on that point, the pamphlet he refers to—by whomsoever written—was certainly not written by Sir Robert Cotton.