Military exploits of Prince Maurice of Nassau, 1st ed. in French; the Fairfax–Osterley Park copy, with first-person marginal notes on the Cadiz action of 1596 and the siege of Ostend, identified as Sir Walter Raleigh’s autograph by William Oldys, who quoted them from this copy in his Life of Ralegh (1736).
Jan Jansz ORLERS
Description & Representation de toutes les Victoires tant par eau que par terre, lesquelles Dieu a octroiees aux nobles, hauts & puissants Seigneurs, Messeignrs les Etats des Provinces Unies du Païs-bas, souz la conduite & gouvernement de son Excellence, le Prince Maurice de Nassau. Leiden: par Jean Jeanzoon Orlers & Henry de Haestens, 1612.
Folio (12 1/4 x 8 inches; 311 x 203mm). Pp. [iv], 282 pp. Half-title (“Les Lauriers de Nassau”). Letterpress title with elaborate engraved surround, the verso with a full-page engraved plate of Prince Maurice of Nassau’s coat-of-arms, faced by a full-page engraved portrait of the Prince. 43 double-page or folding engraved maps and plates (The destruction of the Spanish armada plate with heavy old ink-staining, lighter staining to the four following text leaves, some other spotting, about 5 plates with splits to the central folds, one heavily toned). Contemporary calf over pasteboard, the covers with large central arabesque plaque blocked in gilt, the borders ruled in gilt and blind, old re-backing with red morocco spine label (extremities worn, the upper joint split, some strengthening of the inner joints; bound without pastedowns, as usual in bindings of this period, the period free blanks preserved and bearing the inscriptions and press-marks described below, later flyleaves added at the re-backing).
The hands in this copy
Two principal annotating hands, of distinct dates and characters, are present, together with the pen-trials and signatures of earlier owners.
I. The annotator. The earliest hand is an informal English italic of the early seventeenth century, writing a soldier’s phonetic French (prix for pris, refuse for refus). Its notes cluster on the chapters describing the Anglo-Dutch descent on Cadiz in June 1596 — the action in which Sir Walter Raleigh, commanding the Warspite, led the fleet into the harbour — and they are written not as a reader’s observations but as a participant’s claims, in the first person. Beside the passage describing Raleigh (“Ravvleyg”) requesting the charge of taking the Spanish Indies fleet, asking only his own ship and twelve London merchantmen, and being put off by the Generals until the morrow: en lequelle ils m’ont trompé; par la refuse nous avons perdu 2 millions (“in which they deceived me; by the refusal we lost 2 millions”) — the two-million-ducat ransom offered for the flota, refused, after which the Spaniards fired their own fleet.
Beside the resolution of Howard and Raleigh to attack the galleons: a moy seule (“to me alone”).
Beside the account of the great galleons San Mateo and San Andrés, carried off as prizes: Je ay prix tous deux (“I took both of them”).
Beside “le Lord Thomas Havvard Vice-Admiral, prés de Sire VValter Ravvleyg”: mais bien arrière (“but well astern”) — echoing the grievance that runs through Raleigh’s own manuscript Relation of the Cadiz action, that he led in and the rest came up behind.
The printed count of 57 great ships in the Bay of Cadiz is corrected in the margin to 67.
The same hand annotates the account of the siege of Ostend. Where Orlers rehearses the governors of the town who fell in succession — Gistelles killed in March, Loon who “fut aussi tué,” Berendrecht, Utenhove carried out wounded, Marquette arriving in June 1604 — the annotator supplies, in the same soldier’s French, the commander the chronicler omitted: Coll: Charles Fairfax fut Governeur, et fut aussi tué (“Colonel Charles Fairfax was Governor, and was also killed”) — Sir Charles Fairfax having been killed commanding the English companies at Ostend on 17 September 1604, three days before the town fell. Like the corrected ship-count at Cadiz, this is the amendment of a man who knew the events better than his chronicler.
The identification is, moreover, not new. William Oldys, in the standard eighteenth-century Life of Ralegh prefixed to the 1736 folio of the History of the World, quotes two of these very notes from this copy — A moy seul (“Mr. Brian’s copy of Les Lauriers de Nassau, p. 138”) and J’ay pris tous deux (“Ralegh’s own words in the margin of his Lauriers de Nassau, even with that period which expresses the taking of these two galleons, but not the person who took them”) — treating the volume as Raleigh’s own copy and its marginalia as autograph evidence for his narrative of the Cadiz action. The attribution, standing since 1736 on the authority of the century’s foremost Raleigh scholar, who examined the book itself, awaits formal palaeographic comparison with Raleigh’s autograph Tower notebook (British Library, Add. MS 57555) and his letters.
II. The Fairfax family hand. A second, later seventeenth-century hand writes in English, and its concern is genealogical. On the first period blank it has indexed the volume: Sr Charles Fairfax. p.199. At the passage in question — General Vere’s parley of 23 December 1601, when “le Capitaine Ogle, Lieutenant Colonel, & le Capitaine Fairfax” were sent as hostages to the Archduke’s camp — the same hand glosses the margin: Sr Charles Fairfax, brother to ye first Lord Tho: F.
The formula “the first Lord” dates the note: it presupposes a second Lord Fairfax, and was most naturally written after 1648, when “Lord Thomas Fairfax” meant to every English reader the Lord General. The hand is entirely distinct from that of the French notes; it is the hand of a family reading its own history in the margins of another man’s book, and it explains how the volume came to the Fairfaxes and why it stayed.
III. Earlier owners. Pen-trials and signatures of the seventeenth century on the endleaves record the volume’s passage before it reached the Fairfax library: the name Josephus Acosta written out four times (once with the date 1562); Captaine Clarke; a cancelled George; and the schoolroom tag Si deus est animus, the opening of Cato’s Distichs. The military style of address suggests at least one soldier-owner in the interval between the annotator and the Fairfaxes.
Provenance
It descended to Brian Fairfax the younger (1676–1749), commissioner of customs, in whose hands the copy enters the scholarly record: William Oldys, preparing his Life of Ralegh, examined “Mr. Brian’s copy of Les Lauriers de Nassau” and quoted its marginalia as Raleigh’s autograph in the Life published in 1736. The book appears as lot 945 in the catalogue printed by Prestage for the auction of his library beginning April 26, 1756 — a bare entry (“Description des Victories de Maurice de Nassau, Leyd. 1612”), silent on the manuscript notes, standing on the family’s Low Countries shelf a few lots from Sir Francis Vere’s Commentaries (lot 954), the memoir of the very commander under whom Charles Fairfax served. That auction never took place: the entire Fairfax library was purchased beforehand by the banker Francis Child (1735–1763) and installed at Osterley Park, Middlesex.
Curiously, the volume then passed briefly through the London trade — most plausibly released as a cull or duplicate after Child’s wholesale purchase. On Thursday, February the 7th, 1760, the booksellers L. DAVIS and C. REYMERS opened the sale, at their Great Room against Gray’s Inn Gate, Holborn, of “A Catalogue of about Four Thousand Volumes, lately purchased” — not an auction but a fixed-price catalogue, the lowest price of each book printed. This copy appears as lot 1416, priced at 10s 6d, the notes named and attributed as Oldys’s printed Life had identified them:
1416 Les Lauriers de Nassau, avec fig. with some MS. marginal notes by Sir W. Raleigh, 10s 6d, Leyden, 1612
The cataloguer’s confidence is thus explicable: the identification had stood in print for twenty-four years, in the most authoritative Life of Raleigh of the age, made by Oldys from this very copy — and it is the same identification the internal evidence of the Cadiz passages makes on its own.
The volume’s absence from Osterley was brief: by 1771 it stood again on the Osterley shelves, recorded (“Le Lauriere de Nassau — 1612”) at press-mark X.1.3.9 in the privately printed Catalogus Librorum in Bibliotheca Osterleiensi compiled by Thomas Morell — entered, notably, in the catalogue’s Appendix (Classis Decima, Libri Miscellanei), among the books shelved outside the main classified arrangement, as a volume restored to the library after that arrangement was settled would be. Both that press-mark and an earlier, cancelled mark reading II.2.Pr.9 survive in ink in this copy, fixing its identity with the Morell record beyond question. The cancelled mark is written in the catalogue’s own notation for a separate piece of library furniture, “The Press” (its shelf-lists printed in the form II.2.1, II.2.2 &c., and its abbreviation “Pr.” used in cross-references such as “[Pr. 36. X.1.2.28]”): the book stood first in the Press, case II, shelf 2, ninth book, and was re-shelved into the Appendix at X.1.3.9, its old address struck through — an institutional two-address pattern the printed catalogue itself documents for other volumes (the Bembo at II.2.10 carries the bracketed alternate address “II. 1. Pr. 8”, in the very notation of this copy’s cancelled mark), and one consistent with a book restored to the library after the main arrangement was settled. The printed list of the Press’s case II, shelf 2 shows its ninth place occupied by another work, the present volume having already removed to the Appendix by the time the catalogue was set. There it remained for more than a century, descending with the library to Victor Child Villiers, 7th Earl of Jersey, until the dispersal of the Osterley Park Library by Sotheby, Wilkinson & Hodge over eight days beginning May 6, 1885, where it was lot 1187, sold to Bernard Quaritch for 12 shillings. Quaritch offered it the following month in his rough list of the choicer portion of the Osterley library, item 145, at one pound.
Litt:
William Oldys. The Life of Sir Walter Ralegh, prefixed to Raleigh, The History of the World. London: 1736 (quoting the marginalia of this copy, “Mr. Brian’s copy of Les Lauriers de Nassau”); reprinted in W. Raleigh. The Works… now first collected. Oxford: 1829. Vol.I p.245, etc.
Walter Oakeshott, ‘Sir Walter Ralegh’s Library’, The Library, 5th Ser. 23 (1968), pp. 285-327.
Peter Beal (ed.). Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450–1700 (CELM), Introduction to Sir Walter Ralegh: recording this volume, from Oldys’s citations, as an “unlocated volume” whose authenticity is “not impossible” — here located.
British Library, Add. MS 57555 (Sir Walter Raleigh’s autograph notebook of the Tower years, with the list of his library).
Ref:
Prestage (auctioneer). A Catalogue of the … Library of … Bryan Fairfax… 1756. London: [1756] lot 945
L. Davis and C. Reymers (booksellers). A Catalogue of about Four Thousand Volumes, lately purchased… London: [1760] lot 1416
[Thomas Morell]. Catalogus Librorum in Bibliotheca Osterleiensi. [London?:] 1771. Appendix, Classis Decima (Libri Miscellanei), shelf mark X.1.3.9 (“Le Lauriere de Nassau — 1612”)
Sothebys (auctioneer). The Osterley Park Library. Catalogue …, the property of… the Earl of Jersey : which will be sold by auction… on Wednesday, the 6th day of May, 1885, and seven following days. [London:] 1885. Lot 1187 (sold to Bernard Quaritch for 12 shillings).
Bernard Quaritch. A rough list … including the choicer portion of Osterley Park library… [London: June 1885]. Item 145 (asking price 1 pound).
Mary Olivia Nutting. The Days of Prince Maurice. Boston & Chicago: 1894. See the portrait frontispiece.