When scholars and bibliophiles refer to the Bibliotheca Lindesiana – the Lindsay family library – they almost invariably and correctly are thinking of the great library formed during the nineteenth century. This was a general library, a private library, but like the public libraries of today readily made available to scholars. It was managed by professional librarians, and an idea of the scale of their activities is given by the 150 volumes of their ‘Library Letters’, amounting at its height to some 4,000 incoming and outgoing letters a year. They are today deposited in the National Library of Scotland, part of a larger family archive.
The 25th Earl of Crawford and 8th Earl of Balcarres (1812–80) and his son Ludovic, 26th Earl of Crawford and 9th Earl of Balcarres (1847–1913), were the collectors of this library. Ambitious men, they realised that it would be impossible to build such a general library ever again. Lord Lindsay (as the 25th Earl is usually called) in a letter to his son wrote, ‘Ours will probably be one of the last great private libraries formed in England and even in Europe of the class of which the Harleian, La Vallière, Georgian, Roxburghe, Spencer and Grenville collections … have been, or are the most noble examples’.1
My father, David, 28th Earl of Crawford and 11th Earl of Balcarres (1900–75), set out to write a history of the library from its earliest days in the sixteenth century.2 Although writing basically about the history of the library, his story almost inevitably became intertwined with detailed family history, so limiting its interest to the general public. Also, when it came to the collections of the 25th and 26th Earls, which are of course central to the story, he realised that he neither had the time nor felt he had the professional knowledge to undertake the task. Instead, he asked Nicolas Barker to write it. This was published for the Roxburghe Club in 1977 – a remarkably interesting account, disentangling a complex and exceedingly detailed story of erudite book collecting in the nineteenth century.3 Although Barker reports on a vast number of booksellers and individual books and printers, his account is very readable, even for a person on the fringes of bibliophily and bibliography.
Inevitably, because of the nature of his task, namely to write about the collections of the 25th and 26th Earls, Barker limited the space devoted to the very early days of the family’s library in Scotland in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to a few pages. The founders of the first Lindsay library were two brothers, sons of the 9th Earl of Crawford (died 1558). The elder was Sir David, Lord Lindsay of Edzell (1551?–1610), whose library and large archive flowed into the library at Balcarres, the house in Fife where our family presently reside. The younger brother was John Lindsay, Lord Menmuir (1553–98), who lived at Balcarres. His son, Sir David Lindsay, 1st Lord Lindsay of Balcarres (1586–1641), was an equally important library founder. We also know from his correspondence that David’s son, Alexander Lindsay, 1st Earl of Balcarres (1618–59), was also an enthusiastic collector of books as a young man. On the death of his father he recut his father’s metal armorial book stamp so as to include his own name.
Photograph of recut binding tool depicting armorial supralibros of Alexander Lindsay, 1st Earl of Balcarres
Reproduced courtesy of the Balcarres Heritage Trust
War, and many years of exile, and his death at Breda a few weeks before the Restoration put an end to such pleasures for the 1st Earl.
There has never been any doubt that the library in those days was a significant one. In 1623 the poet William Drummond, sending a gift of his Flowres of Sion (515) to ‘Sir David Lyndsay of Backarrois Knight’, writes saying, ‘what a difficultie it were to send you a booke which ye (perhaps) had not alreddy’.4 Nearly a century later in 1710, Sir Robert Sibbald in his History of Fife and Kinross describes the library at Balcarres as ‘a great Bibliotheck’.5
It seems worthwhile to explore those early days of the first Bibliotheca Lindesiana in rather more detail: finding out what early Lindsay books still exist in institutional libraries in Great Britain and overseas; trying to place the library in the context of its time; and understanding something of the motivations of the founders – how, where and why they acquired their books.
More than a decade ago Bill Zachs and Meg Ford (in her private capacity as a scholar), expressed interest in the project. Meg initially transferred a rather amateur card index of more than one hundred early Lindsay books (principally at Balcarres) into a computer file. Then Bill, with the expert help of Kamillea Aghtan, increased the number of books connected with the library to a figure of some two hundred and fifty. To have built up a list of such books that had been in the Balcarres Library during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was pleasing, but in no way did it answer the question which had worried Lord Lindsay. When writing in 1849 he could not understand the disappearance of what he knew had been a large library. He believed that it had quite literally been thrown away – torn up and used as wrapping paper and for lighting fires.6
It took a lot of work and perseverance, but we now know what happened. We now know the title of nearly every book which had been in the library at Balcarres. We know the names of the authors, the size of the books and the dates when and places where they were printed. Bill Zachs’s search for a catalogue of an auction in Edinburgh in 1792 and the excitement of finding what we think is probably the only copy which survives is described in Chapter 3. I will, however, describe the background which caused a member of a family noted for its interest in collecting books suddenly deciding to sell the entire library which had been built up by earlier generations. The events taking place in the family can perhaps explain what might have happened.
From his early days Alexander Lindsay (1752–1825), later 6th Earl of Balcarres, was ambitious to restore the family fortunes. They were in a desperate state. Twice the head of the family had been exiled for long periods. The estate had been sequestrated by Cromwell, whose officers took away some Lindsay books which later found their way to the Worcester College Library in Oxford. Substantial gifts and loans to finance the raising of regiments for the Stuarts were never repaid. From the age of fifteen Alexander had been a soldier, abroad for much of his life – at one time a prisoner of war in America, at other times Governor of Jersey and Governor of Jamaica. In 1780 he married Elizabeth Bradshaigh Dalrymple. She was described as a ‘bare bride’, with virtually no money at all. In due course, however, she inherited the Haigh Estate in Lancashire. The estate was also in great disorder. Squatters occupied Haigh Hall; the coal mining had been virtually abandoned. Alexander could, however, see the ‘capabilities’ of the estate, but he had absolutely no capital to develop it.
Coinciding with Alexander’s wish to move to Haigh, his brother, Robert Lindsay, returned home after some twenty years in India where he had prospered. An entrepreneur through and through, he had manufactured lime; he had built ships 300 miles inland where none had been built before; he captured and trained elephants for the work, at one time owning 160 of them. During the monsoon season he floated the ships down rivers to the sea and had them sailed to Dacca, 800 miles away.
In 1791 Alexander sold the Scottish estate at Balcarres to Robert and went to live at Haigh Hall. Robert was a man of business, drive and achievement. He began a thoroughly necessary modernisation of the estate, enclosing fields and ‘improving’ the house. These ‘improvements’ unfortunately involved the knocking down of several seventeenth-century decorative plaster ceilings, only one of which still survives in what is now our family dining room. One can perhaps well imagine his frustration at finding himself encumbered with piles of old books, covered with dust, and as Lady Anne Barnard, Robert’s and Alexander’s sister, had said, ‘providing meals for all the moths in the castle’. One can imagine Robert gathering them together and sending them all off to Edinburgh for sale in Cornelius Elliot’s auction rooms over eleven days.
Now, with the discovery of the printed auction catalogue, we can for the first time ‘reassemble’ the original Bibliotheca Lindesiana to tell the story of a Scottish library of considerable significance. Beyond Bill Zachs, who has guided this project tirelessly from start to finish, important contributions have come from Jane Stevenson and Peter Davidson and above all from Kelsey Jackson Williams. I am grateful to all of them for their unremitting collaborative labour in once more bringing the first Lindsay Library to light.
The 29th Earl of Crawford and 12th Earl of Balcarres, KT, GCVO, PC, DL
September 2021
‘Lord Lindsay’s Library Report, 1861–65’, manuscript penes the present Earl of Crawford, p. 14.
David Alexander Robert Lindsay, 28th Earl of Crawford, Bibliotheca Lindesiana, 2 vols. Undated, bound typescript, penes the present Earl of Crawford. Referred to as ‘Crawford’ in the present volume.
Nicolas Barker, Bibliotheca Lindesiana (London: Roxburghe Club, 1977).
Quoted in Crawford, I. 71–72.
Sir Robert Sibbald, The History, Ancient and Modern, of the Sheriffdoms of Fife and Kinross (Edinburgh: Printed by James Watson, 1710), p. 137.
Bibliotheca Lindesiana: Catalogue of the Printed Books Preserved at Haigh Hall, Wigan, Co. Pal. Lancast., 3 vols. (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1910), I. vii.