Coming to Dominic Winter on September 11th: The Polydore Vergil bound for Queen Mary I

Dominic Winter’s 11 September auction has an unusually high number of antiquarian books and manuscripts, many lots pre-1700. There are leaves from Caxton incunables, a fine Book of Hours, embroidered bindings, association copies and miniature books to name just some, but the undoubted star lot, adorning the catalogue covers, is the Polydore Vergil bound for Mary Tudor.

According to our researches no books from Queen Mary’s library have ever come up for auction. Her small library was dispersed after her death and most of the books and manuscripts extant are in major British libraries and collections.

The book itself is the third edition of Polydore Vergil’s Anglica Historia, published in 1555, the year of the author’s death. (Polydore Vergil’s last-known letter is one of congratulation to Mary I upon her accession to the English throne, dated 5 August 1553, shortly after she had been proclaimed queen.)

Written in the European common language of Latin it is a major history of England, this third edition adding a new final chapter to include the life of Mary’s father Henry VIII. Thus, both Mary and her half-sister the later Elizabeth I are mentioned in the text. Indeed, Vergil, who lived in England for many years, where he was involved with Anglo-papal diplomacy, began writing the work around 1506 with the encouragement of Henry VII.

Not only would the work have been widely read and highly influential among the royal and noble families of Europe it indirectly fed into the history plays of Shakespeare through its influence on the 16th-century chroniclers Raphael Holinshed and Edward Hall.

The folio volume has a later calf binding (c. 1800) but with the original gilt-decorated panels bearing the royal arms and monogram ‘M R’ of Mary relaid. The border design is consistent with the workshop of the Medallion binder who worked from the end of King Henry VIII’s reign through to the early years of Queen Elizabeth I, or the equally anonymous King Edward VI and Queen Mary Binder, a London atelier active from about 1545 until at least 1558.

The text is red-ruled throughout, has a hand-coloured title vignette, some early marginalia on two pages and the bookplate of Francis Fortescue Turvile (1752-1839), an ancestor of the current owners. The interest and intrigue does not end there, however. Bound in at the front of the book are four contemporary pen and ink and watercolour maps of England & Wales, Ireland, Scotland and France.

The identity of the skilled cartographer and their sources is a mystery yet to be solved. The earliest large-scale detail map of England was by George Lily and first published in 1553. There are very few cartographers who would have had the knowledge and resources to draw these maps with such detail and so accurately which adds to the puzzle. One possibility is the King (and later Queen’s) Printer, the Gelderland-born Reyner Wolfe (died in or before 1574). Further research will be required but, over and beyond the book itself, the maps are undoubtedly of great significance and of national importance.

The most likely provenance path for the book is that it passed from Queen Mary to Anne Rede, who then passed it on to Sir John Fortescue of Salden, in whose family possession it remained until the mid-eighteenth-century when, via the Turvile (or Turville) and Constable-Maxwell lines, the book remained at Bosworth, Leicestershire, until the present day.

The book’s existence had been forgotten and was only recently rediscovered in the family library by Dr Peter Leech, a musicologist, lecturer and conductor at Cardiff University School of Music, who is a specialist in the cultural history of British Catholicism from the 16th century to 1800.

This magnificent and culturally significant volume is offered as lot 266 in Dominic Winter's 36th anniversary sale on 11 September with an estimate of £20,000-30,000.

A full description with illustrations, additional notes on the binding, the provenance and the cartography is available on the website and in the printed, PDF and virtual versions of the catalogue.