But although Henry VIII. did not buy books extensively, he sometimes borrowed them, and several entries chronicle the lending of books to him by monastic and other libraries, when he was pestering Christendom for arguments in favour of his divorce from Katharine of Arragon.

Nevertheless, in spite of adverse circumstances, the Royal library had been steadily growing in the course of ages, and had by this time assumed notable proportions.  Henry VIII. found himself the possessor of a collection of books at Windsor, comprising 109 volumes in bindings of velvet and leather, with silver and jewelled clasps; of another at Westminster, consisting of Latin primers, some richly ornamented, of a few Greek authors, Latin classics, and English chronicles, “bokes written in tholde Saxon tongue.”  He had another library at Beaulieu (now New Hall) in Essex, with about 60 volumes of Latin authors, besides works of the Fathers, dictionaries, and histories.  At Beddington in Surrey he had many chronicles and romances, and “a greate boke of parchment written and lymned with gold of graver’s work—­De Confessione Amantis, which may be identified as the Ms., now marked 18 C 22, in the Royal library.  At Richmond was a small collection made by his father, consisting chiefly of missals and romances.  At St. James’s Palace were, among others, works described vaguely as “a boke of parchment containing divers patterns; a white boke written on parchment; one boke covered with green velvet contained in a wooden case; a little boke covered with crimson velvet,” and so on, a curious method of cataloguing and utterly useless for the purpose of identification after so long an interval.  Here and there a distinctive title occurs, such as the Foundation Book of Henry VIIth’s Chapel.

All these different small collections together represented the Royal library in the early part of the sixteenth century.  Henry VIII. had the greater number of the books removed to Greenwich, where there were already some printed volumes and a few manuscripts.  That part which remained at Westminster was enriched with some of the spoils of the monasteries, placed there perhaps by Leland to save them from destruction.* Among these was a Latin Evangelia of the eleventh century (1 D 3), which belonged to the monks of Rochester, and which had been given to them by a certain Countess Goda, according to an inscription in the book itself.  From Christ Church, Canterbury, came a fine copy of the gospels (1 A 1 8), presented to that monastery by King Athelstan, and from St. Alban’s several choice historical and theological works from the pen of Matthew Paris.

* Edward’s Memoirs of Libraries, i., 364 et seq.