Chapter VI: The Founders of the Sloane Museum (3)

When the Memorial of SLOANE’S Trustees was first presented to GEORGE THE SECOND, he received it with the stolid indifference to all matters bearing upon science and mental culture, which was as saliently characteristic of that king as were his grosser vices. ‘I don’t think there are twenty thousand pounds in the Treasury,’ was the remark with which he dismissed the proposal. Money could be found, indeed, for very foolish purposes, and for very base ones. And the bareness of the Treasury was, very often, the natural result of the profligacy of the Court. But, in 1753, it was a fact.

Save for Speaker ONSLOW’S exertions, the Memorial would have fared little better in Parliament than at Court. The then Premier, Henry PELHAM, was not unfriendly to the scheme, nor was he, like his royal master, a man of sordid nature; but a Minister who was every now and then obliged to write to his ambassadors abroad, even in the crisis of important negotiations, ‘I have ordered you a part of your last year’s appointments, but we are so poor that I can do no more,’ could hardly be eager to provide forty or fifty thousand pounds for the purchase of a new Museum and the safety of an old Library.

[Sidenote: 1753. _Commons’ Journals_, March 19, seqq.]

ONSLOW proposed—eventually—as a means of overcoming these difficulties, that a sum of money should be raised by a public lottery, and that it should be large enough to effect not only the immediate objects contemplated by the Will of Sir Hans SLOANE, and by the prior public establishment of Sir Robert COTTON’S Library, but to purchase for a like purpose the noble series of Manuscripts which had passed (just eleven years before SLOANE’S death) to the executors of the last Earl of OXFORD, in trust for his widow, the Dowager Countess, and for his daughter, the Duchess of PORTLAND.

Edward, Earl of OXFORD, had stood at one period of his life, in the rank of the wealthiest of Englishmen. He was the owner of estates worth some four or five hundred thousand pounds. He was, too, a man of highly intellectual and studious tastes; but, in his case, a magnificent style of living, great generosity, and excessive trust in dependants, did what is more usually the work of huge folly or of gross sins; they brought him into circumstances which, for his position in life, might almost be called those of poverty. But for this comparative impoverishment, his own act—it is more than probable—would have secured to posterity the enjoyment, in its entirety, of the splendid library he had inherited and increased.

To the proposal of a lottery there was much solid objection. What were then called ‘parliamentary lotteries’ had been introduced expressly to put down those private lotteries, common in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which had been fraught with mischief. It was hoped, or pretended, that a ‘regulated’ evil would be reduced within tolerable limits, whilst bringing grist to the national mill. But the forty years that had passed since the first parliamentary lottery of 1709 had shown that the system was essentially and incurably mischievous. PELHAM was averse to its continuance. As First Lord of the Treasury, it was his poverty, not his will, that consented to the adoption of so questionable an expedient for the purchase of the SLOANE Collections. He had not, individually, any such love of learning as might have induced an appeal to Parliament to set, for once, an example of liberal and far-sighted legislation. He merely stipulated that some stringent provisos should be put into the Act, directed against the nefarious practices of the lottery-jobbers.

[Sidenote: THE LOTTERY OF 1753 FOR THE PURCHASE OF THE SLOANE AND
HARLEIAN COLLECTIONS.]

Eventually, it was enacted that there should be a hundred thousand shares, at three pounds a share; that two hundred thousand pounds should be allotted as prizes, and that the remaining hundred thousand—less the expenses of the lottery itself—should be applied to the threefold purposes of the Act, namely, the purchase of the SLOANE and HARLEIAN Collections; the providing of a Repository; and the creation of an annual income for future maintenance.

By the precautionary clauses of the Bill, provision was made for the prolonged sale of shares; for the prevention of the purchase by any one adventurer of more than twenty shares, or ‘tickets,’ and for other impediments, as it was thought, to a fraudulent traffic in the combined covetousness and ignorance of the unwary.

All these precautions proved to be vain. Mr. PELHAM’S opposition was abundantly justified by the result. Fraud proved to be, in that age, just as inseparable an element in a Lottery scheme, however good its purpose, as fraud has proved to be, in this age, an inseparable element (at one stage or other of the business) in a Railway scheme,—however useful the line proposed to be made.

It thus came to pass that the foundation of the BRITISH MUSEUM gave rise to a great public scandal. When evidence was produced that many families had been brought to misery, as the first incident in the annals of a beneficent and noble foundation, a somewhat dull Session of Parliament was suddenly enlivened by an animated and angry debate.

[Sidenote: THE PROSECUTION OF LEHEUP FOR HIS DEALINGS WITH THE MUSEUM
LOTTERY.]

The provident clauses in the Lottery Act of 1753 were made of no effect, mainly by entrusting the chief share in working the Act to an accomplished jobber. One Peter LEHEUP was made a Commissioner of the Lottery. This man had held some employment or other at Hanover, from which he had been recalled with circumstances of disgrace. [Sidenote: 1753. December.] It is to be inferred, from the way in which his name points an epigrammatic phrase in one of the letters of BOLINGBROKE,[53] and in more than one of those of Horace WALPOLE, that it had come, long before this appointment took place, to have a sort of proverbial currency, like the names of ‘CURLL’ or of ‘CHARTRES.’ But, be that as it may, Mr. Commissioner LEHEUP set on foot as thriving and as flagitious a traffic in SLOANE lottery tickets, as was ever set on foot in railway shares by a clever promoter of our own day. He wrote circular letters instructing his correspondents how most effectually to evade the Act. He sold nearly three hundred tickets to a single dealer by furnishing him with a list of ‘Roes’ and ‘Does,’ ‘Gileses’ and ‘Stileses’ at discretion. He supplied himself, with equal liberality; and contrived to close the subscription, after an actual publicity of exactly six hours—for the issue of one hundred thousand tickets. In a few days, of course, tickets in abundance were to be had, at sixteen shillings premium upon each, and in what looked to be a still rising market. The trap proved to be brilliantly ‘successful.’

The subsequent explosion of parliamentary anger was rather increased than lessened by an attempt of Henry FOX (afterwards the first Lord Holland) to extenuate LEHEUP’S offence by some arguments of the ‘_Tu quoque_’ sort. By a great majority, the House of Commons sent up an address praying the King to direct his Attorney General to prosecute the chief offender, who was accordingly convicted and fined a thousand pounds. It is not uninstructive to note that Horace WALPOLE—himself one of the SLOANE Trustees—treats the matter in one of his letters exactly in the offhand man-of-the-world style in which Henry FOX had treated it in the House of Commons.[54]

By this unfortunate episode, the name of one of the best of Englishmen was brought into a sort of momentary connection with the name of one of the worst. But the chief discredit of the story does not really rest upon LEHEUP. A private citizen, of moderate means, had been willing to expend seventy or eighty thousand pounds—besides an inestimable amount of labour and research—upon an object essentially and largely public. Yet a British Parliament could not summon up enough of public spirit to tax its own members, in common with their tax-paying fellow subjects throughout the realm, to the extent of a hundred thousand pounds, in order to meet an obvious public want, to redeem an actual parliamentary pledge, and to secure a conspicuous national honour for all time to come. That want of public spirit did not exhaust its results with the ruin of the poor families, scattered here and there, whose scanty means had been hazarded and lost by gambling, under a parliamentary temptation. It impressed itself, so to speak, on the subsequent history of the institution for more than forty years. The Museum had been founded grudgingly. It was kept up parsimoniously.

Had that fact been otherwise, the story of the knavery of Peter LEHEUP would have little merited recital a century after it, and he, had passed into oblivion.

The value of so small an incident in the crowded story of our National Museum lies simply in the fact that it forms a just and salient illustration of the narrowness of spirit with which the then representatives of the people received the liberal gift of public benefactors. It serves to show why it was that, from the year 1753 down to some years after 1800, the History of the British Museum casts very little honour on Britain as a nation, whereas the precedent history of its integral parts, as separate and infant collections, casts, and will long continue to cast, great honour on the memory of the COTTONS, the HARLEYS, and the SLOANES, by whom they were painfully gathered and most liberally dispensed.

Happily, as the course of this narrative—whatever its shortcomings—cannot fail to show, the literary and scientific treasures which men of that stamp had collected, came, in a subsequent generation (and, in a chief measure, by dint of the exertions of the Trustees and Officers to whom they had been, in course of time, confided) to be more adequately estimated by Ministers and by Parliament in their public capacity, as well as by the more cultivated portion of the people generally. For more than a half-century past the History of the British Museum has been one that any Briton may take delight and pride in telling. And such it promises to be, preeminently, in the time yet to come. In a conspicuous sense, the men by whom it was first founded, and the men by whom, for what is now a long time past, it has been administered and governed, have alike been true workers for Posterity.