Thomas Bodley

English scholar

• Born: March 2, 1545
• Birthplace: Exeter, Devon, England
• Died: January 28, 1613
• Place of death: London, England

Bodley founded the Bodleian Library at Oxford University in England, which quickly became and remains one of the world’s great research libraries.

Early Life

Thomas Bodley (BAHD-lee) was born in Devon. His father was John Bodley, a successful merchant of that city, and his mother was Joan, the daughter of Robert Hone of Ottery Saint Mary, Devon. The family was staunchly Protestant and went into exile during the reign of the Catholic queen, Mary I . In May, 1557, the Bodleys moved from Frankfurt to Geneva. There, the twelve-year-old Thomas Bodley studied divinity from John Calvin and Theodore Beza while he learned Greek from Philip Beroaldus and Hebrew from Antoine Chevallier, later a professor of Hebrew at Cambridge.

The death of Queen Mary on November 17, 1558, brought the Protestant Elizabeth to the English throne and ended the Bodley family’s exile. They returned to London, and in 1559 the fifteen-year-old Thomas began his studies at Magdalen College, Oxford, under Lawrence Humphrey, a friend of his father and a fellow Marian exile. Bodley received his bachelor of arts in 1563 and in the same year became a probationary fellow of Merton College. The next year, Merton granted him a full fellowship.

During his time as a senior member of the university, Bodley was moderately successful. He began lecturing without fee on Greek at Merton in 1565 with such success that the college voted him a stipend and made the lectures a permanent institution. After receiving his master of arts degree in 1566, he began giving university lectures on natural philosophy, was elected a university proctor in 1569, and served as deputy public orator. It was during these years that he matured into a square-built, distinguished person with close-cropped dark hair and beard. Then, in 1576, Merton granted him a leave of absence to go abroad and study modern foreign languages. Four years of travel in Italy, France, and Germany allowed him to achieve proficiency in a number of foreign languages, particularly Italian, French, and Spanish.

Life’s Work

When Bodley left Oxford in 1576, he had little intention of returning. Instead, he hoped ultimately to enter the service of the English government. By the early 1580’s, he appeared to have secured the patronage of Sir Francis Walsingham and Robert Dudley, the earl of Leicester. One of them probably obtained for him a seat as a member of Parliament for Portsmouth in 1584. His first diplomatic mission came in the next year, when he traveled to Denmark to obtain support for Henry of Navarre and the French Protestants.

After his return from Denmark, Bodley scored the greatest triumph of his life when he married Ann, the daughter of Richard Carey (or Carew) of Bristol and the widow of the wealthy merchant Nicholas Ball of Totnes, Devon, on July 19, 1586. It was Ball’s fortune that allowed Bodley to refound and endow the library that bears his name. Ball had died in March, so his wife had remained a widow for a mere four months. Yet even then, Bodley was not Ann’s first suitor. Another man was on the verge of “winning” her when Bodley arrived. Examining the situation, he persuaded the hapless man to play his hand in a card game. With his rival thus occupied, Bodley sought out the widow Ann in the garden, wooed her, and won her promise of marriage. In this way, he acquired a wife, a fortune, and seven stepchildren who would later receive little benefit from their natural father’s wealth as a result of its philanthropic diversion by their stepfather. Bodley and Ann had no children of their own.

Bodley’s marriage quickly proved its value. Ann’s contacts in Devon and Cornwall gained for Bodley a place in the session of Parliament called on September 15, 1586, for the borough of Saint Germans, Cornwall. During 1588, the Elizabethan government sent him on a confidential mission to the fugitive King Henry III of France. Almost as soon as he returned home, he found himself appointed to replace Henry Killigrew as the resident English envoy on the Netherlands Council of State. Bodley served in that difficult post from 1589 to 1596. Queen Elizabeth complicated relations with the Dutch by insisting that they pay for the full cost of English military assistance in the war with Spain. Again and again, Bodley found himself thwarted by the uncooperative Dutch or placed in an impossible position by his own government. By 1592, he was hoping for recall, and in 1594, he quarreled with William Cecil (Lord Burghley), the queen’s chief minister, and asked to be relieved. That did not occur, but the incident was probably a big step in Bodley’s progress toward deciding to abandon government service altogether.

Still unable to accomplish Queen Elizabeth’s diplomatic bidding by 1596, Bodley returned home to discover that in his irascible queen’s opinion he deserved hanging. Furthermore, the mutual animosities of Robert Devereux, the earl of Essex, and Lord Burghley had cost him a promotion to be secretary of state. At that point, he decided to retire. Never again would he resume his career of government service and diplomacy. A mission was offered but refused in 1598, and James I’s government tried one last time to coax him out of retirement during 1604 and 1605. This effort gained for him a knighthood but it did not change his mind.

The weary and disillusioned Bodley desired a project for his labor and talents that would bring him peace and satisfaction. After some thought, he settled on the refounding of a university library for Oxford. The original had disappeared in the middle of the sixteenth century during the turmoil of the Edwardian Reformation. Thus, on February 23, 1598, Bodley wrote to the vice chancellor of Oxford University offering to refurbish the library, to secure books for it, to hire a staff, to attract other benefactors, and, above all, to establish a permanent endowment he believed was essential to the library’s long-term survival.

Work and planning for the new library proceeded quickly. From the first, Bodley persuaded the university to appoint six delegates to oversee the library. These included his trusted friends Thomas Allen and William Gent, fellows of Gloucester Hall, and John Hawley, the principal of the same college. By the end of 1599 at the latest, a librarian had been found, although the university did not officially confirm his appointment until April, 1602. Thomas James of New College practiced scholarship with a deeply antipapal thrust and proved to be an able head for the new library.

Meanwhile, the work of refurbishing the library approached completion in June, 1600. It was a source of great relief to Bodley, since he could now begin to solicit in earnest the books and money needed to build up the library’s collection.

Bodley took great interest in collecting books for his library. His house at Fulham, in London, continued to be his principal residence, and it was there that he collected the books he sought or solicited until they were dispatched in yearly batches to Oxford. Even the most casual offers of gifts were followed up. Potential donors were never allowed to forget exactly what they had offered. Thomas Allen, the library delegate, and Thomas James, the librarian, both significantly assisted Bodley in his efforts to attract donations of books, manuscripts, and money. In fact, James made the suggestion that resulted in the Stationers’ Company agreeing in 1610 to deposit one free copy of every book that they printed in the Bodleian. Thanks to these efforts, between 1600 and 1605, seventeen hundred pounds were raised to buy books. By 1605, the collection contained fifty-six hundred volumes, for which James had compiled an up-to-date printed catalog. Growth continued so that by Bodley’s death in early 1613 the library housed about seven thousand volumes or about fifteen thousand titles along with eight hundred manuscripts. The Bodleian Library had quickly grown to be one of the significant research collections of its day.

Bodley believed that it was his library’s purpose to preserve the entire range of human knowledge. This attitude is reflected in his continuing efforts systematically to acquire Hebrew and Arabic books. As early as 1603, the Bodleian purchased its first Chinese books, although there was no one who could read them. Policies concerning admission to the library also reflected a broad-minded philosophy. Almost any member of the university could use the library if he fulfilled certain conditions. Furthermore, students from foreign universities were also admitted if their subject of research met the approval of university authorities.

The library’s rapid growth caused it to overflow quickly its original quarters. Bodley’s last years and large amounts of his treasure were spent getting the Arts End extension built during 1610-1612. This building was the first to use wall shelving in a public library in England. Bodley’s other final worry was to secure the permanent endowment to the Bodleian from challenge by any of his disgruntled heirs. He therefore produced a will on January 2, 1613, which gave his endowment firm protection with powerful overseers such as William Abbot, the archbishop of Canterbury, and Edward Coke, then chief justice of Common Pleas. Although Bodley remembered most members of his family and his servants in his will, their portions were much reduced by the immense endowment of seven thousand pounds that he gave to his library. Many criticized his lack of generosity to his family and stepchildren (Ann had died in 1611). After his death, his brother Lawrence Bodley and a niece, Elizabeth Willis, unsuccessfully contested the will. In the meantime, Bodley died on January 28, 1613, at his home in London after a lingering illness. He was buried with great pomp in the Merton College chapel.

Significance

Sir Thomas Bodley had great ability, immense pride, and a sensitive ego. If he had not possessed those traits, his energies would probably not have been redirected from a reasonably successful diplomatic career into the role of library benefactor. His premier achievement of refounding Oxford’s university library has overshadowed his state service. Although battered and frustrated, Bodley survived the rigors of diplomatic service in the Netherlands. A close association with the ill-fated earl of Essex did not permanently taint him in the eyes of the English government, which continued to seek his valuable skills long after he had lost any desire to offer them. Voluntarily forgoing the disconcerting world of diplomatic service, Bodley secured his place in history by benefiting scholarship. The Bodleian Library became the best academic library in England during his lifetime and remained in a class by itself until the British Museum and the Cambridge University Library began to catch up in the nineteenth century.

Bibliography

Bodleian Library. Wonderful Things from Four Hundred Years of Collecting: The Bodleian Library, 1602-2002 An Exhibition to Mark the Quatercentenary of the Bodleian, July to December, 2002. Oxford, England: The Library, 2002. Exhibition catalog from an exhibition of the Bodleian’s most famous and important holdings. Includes illustrations, photographs, facsimiles, maps, and music.

Bodley, Thomas. Letters of Sir Thomas Bodley to the University of Oxford, 1598-1611. Edited by G. W. Wheeler. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1927. An edition of fifteen letters from Bodley to the various vice chancellors of the university concerning his library. These letters are also available in the Bodleian Quarterly Record, volume 5. Wheeler has also edited the correspondence between Bodley and his librarian Thomas James.

Chamberlain, John. The Chamberlain Letters: A Selection of the Letters of John Chamberlain Concerning Life in England from 1597 to 1626. Edited by Elizabeth McClure Thomson. New York: Capricorn Books, 1966. A selection of extracts from Norman Egbert McClure’s two-volume The Letters of John Chamberlain (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1939). Includes Chamberlain’s description of the Bodleian’s buildings and his critical comments concerning Bodley’s vanity in leaving a fortune for a library named after himself while neglecting his legitimate heirs and family.

Doran, Susan. Elizabeth I and Foreign Policy, 1558-1603. New York: Routledge, 2000. Short monograph on Elizabeth’s foreign policy. Discusses her personal abilities as a stateswoman, as well as the general diplomatic objectives Bodley was expected to fulfill. Includes genealogical tables, maps, bibliographic references.

Mallet, Charles Edward. A History of the University of Oxford. 3 vols. London: Methuen, 1924-1927. Reprint. New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1968. Mallet’s work is to be superseded by the projected multivolume “Oxford History of Oxford University.” Ian Philip’s account of the foundation of the Bodleian is superior, but Mallet has some unique information.

Morris, Jan, ed. The Oxford Book of Oxford. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. An anthology of extracts of documents and anecdotes relating to Oxford. Includes several items relating to Bodley and the early years of his library. Bodley’s letter of February 23, 1598, offering to refurbish and restore the university library, is in this collection.

Philip, Ian. The Bodleian Library in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. A scrupulously researched and well-written account of the Bodleian Library from 1598 to 1800 by a retired member of its staff who is also a recognized library historian. The best work available on the subject.

Wernham, R. B. After the Armada: Elizabethan England and the Struggle for Western Europe, 1588-1595. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. An excellent account of English foreign policy and military relations during a time of great international turmoil. Provides a context for Bodley’s diplomatic efforts in the Netherlands and gives a good indication of why he found his service there to be so frustrating.

Wood, Anthony. Athenae Oxonienses: An Exact History of All the Writers and Bishops Who Have Had Their Education in the University of Oxford. 2 vols. London: Thomas Bennet, 1691-1692. Reprint. New York: Burt Franklin, 1968. A collection of biographical sketches of famous Oxford men starting with 1500 and including most of the seventeenth century. Originally published in 1691 and 1692 by one of Oxford’s most famous antiquarians. Bodley’s entry is located in volume 2 and its eulogistic tone shows the deep gratitude that his library benefaction inspired in the scholarly community by the late seventeenth century.